logo
ENع
#

Latest news with #CoreAI

Former Microsoft engineer Vaniya Agrawal continues anti-Israel protests by disrupting Build 2025 AI event
Former Microsoft engineer Vaniya Agrawal continues anti-Israel protests by disrupting Build 2025 AI event

Time of India

time23-05-2025

  • Business
  • Time of India

Former Microsoft engineer Vaniya Agrawal continues anti-Israel protests by disrupting Build 2025 AI event

Tensions over Microsoft 's controversial Israel cloud agreements are boiling over once again, this time inside its own developer conference halls. On day three of the Build 2025 event in Seattle, the company was forced to pause an AI security session as former employees Vaniya Agrawal and Hossam Nasr confronted executives on stage. The disruption came during a high-profile presentation led by Neta Haiby, Microsoft's Head of AI Security, and Sarah Bird, the company's Head of Responsible AI. As the session progressed, Agrawal and Nasr loudly interrupted, accusing the company of complicity in the war in Gaza and demanding Microsoft sever ties with the Israeli military. Also read: Indian-American techie shouts 'Shame on you' to Microsoft bosses days before her resignation: Who is Vaniya Agrawal? by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Play War Thunder now for free War Thunder Play Now Undo The episode marked the latest in a string of escalating protests targeting Microsoft's ongoing cloud services agreement with Israel, reportedly worth $133 million. Build 2025 marred by protests over Israel ties This year's Build 2025, intended to showcase Microsoft's innovations in artificial intelligence and cloud computing , has instead become a flashpoint for internal dissent and activism. On May 19, a Microsoft employee interrupted CEO Satya Nadella's keynote address with a protest. A day later, a Palestinian tech professional disrupted an Azure AI session led by Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President of CoreAI, calling for Microsoft to "cut ties" with Israel. Live Events Agrawal's protest, however, adds deeper weight due to her public resignation and repeated activism. She first made headlines in April when she stormed Microsoft's 50th anniversary celebration at its Redmond headquarters, confronting Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Nadella in person. Her actions led to her dismissal from the company. Vaniya Agrawal: from AI engineer to protest leader Agrawal had joined Microsoft in September 2023 after spending over three years at Amazon. At Microsoft, she worked in the AI division, but her tenure ended just seven months later when she submitted a fiery resignation letter denouncing what she called Microsoft's role in enabling 'genocide in the Gaza Strip.' Also read: Microsoft says it provided AI to Israeli military for war but denies use to harm people in Gaza "Microsoft cloud and AI enable the Israeli military to be more lethal and destructive in Gaza," she wrote in a company-wide email before leaving the firm on April 11. Microsoft swiftly condemned the disruptions, calling the behavior 'hostile, unprovoked, and highly inappropriate.' Alongside Agrawal, another employee involved in the April anniversary protest was also terminated. Despite the backlash, Agrawal has remained defiant. Her repeated interventions, including at Build 2025, suggest a growing movement within the tech community questioning corporate ties with military regimes and demanding greater ethical accountability in AI and cloud computing operations. Microsoft under pressure amid global backlash Microsoft's cloud services deal with Israel's Ministry of Defence has drawn increasing scrutiny from activists and employees alike. Critics argue the company's AI and Azure platforms are not only supporting military logistics but also exacerbating human rights violations in the Gaza Strip. Also read: Protester shouts 'show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians' during CEO Satya Nadella's key speech; Watch video here These employee-led protests are part of a broader trend across Silicon Valley, where tech workers are using their platforms to challenge corporate policies tied to global conflicts. As Microsoft continues to invest heavily in AI and expand its cloud footprint, the ethical dimensions of these contracts may become a permanent issue on its public stage.

Microsoft put an ex-Facebook exec in charge of a new AI unit. Internal memos reveal how it's going.
Microsoft put an ex-Facebook exec in charge of a new AI unit. Internal memos reveal how it's going.

Business Insider

time22-05-2025

  • Business
  • Business Insider

Microsoft put an ex-Facebook exec in charge of a new AI unit. Internal memos reveal how it's going.

Microsoft hired ex-Facebook global head of engineering Jay Parikh to lead a new AI unit called CoreAI. Internal memos Parikh has sent to employees reveal the unit's early ambitions and accomplishments. Parikh's initiatives focus on cultural shifts, operational improvements, and customer focus. Microsoft envisions an " age of AI agents," and CEO Satya Nadella recently tapped one of Mark Zuckerberg's former top lieutenants to bring it to reality. In January, Nadella put Jay Parikh in charge of a new AI unit called CoreAI, central to Microsoft's ambition to help developers build digital personal assistants capable of taking over tasks from human workers. Amid Parikh's first Microsoft Build developer conference in this new role, internal memos reveal his goals for the unit, its early accomplishments, and his advice to address what he sees as problems within the company. Microsoft declined to comment. A fresh perspective for the 'next phase of Microsoft' Behind the scenes at Microsoft, Nadella prides himself on hiring outside talent from other big technology companies to add fresh perspective and giving them wide latitude to change how things are done, several people close to the CEO told BI. Those reports include Charlie Bell, who helped build Amazon's cloud from its earliest days before defecting to Microsoft to become its security boss, and AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, an ex-Google executive who joined the company from AI startup Inflection. Parikh joined their ranks in October after running cloud security company Laceworks, acquired in 2024. He previously was vice president and global head of engineering for Meta. Zuckerberg has publicly credited Parikh for many technological achievements during his 11-year tenure at the company. When Nadella announced Parikh's hiring in an email to employees, he wrote that the "next phase of Microsoft" would require "adding exceptional talent" from outside the company. In January, when Microsoft reorganized to create a new organization under Parikh. The group, called CoreAI, combined teams from Parikh's new direct reports like Eric Boyd, a corporate vice president of AI platform; Jason Taylor, a deputy CTO for AI infrastructure; Julia Liuson, president of the developer division; and Tim Bozarth, a corporate vice president of developer infrastructure. Nadella said at the time that Parikh would also work closely with the cloud-and-AI chief Scott Guthrie; the experiences-and-devices leader Rajesh Jha; Bell, the security boss; Suleyman, Microsoft's AI CEO; and Kevin Scott, the company's CTO. A copy of Parikh's latest org chart viewed by Business Insider shows he has nearly 10,000 reports, most of whom (about 7,000) are in the developer division under Liuson. Parikh's 'agent factory' vision Four months in, Parikh has started to make his mark on Microsoft with a vision to create an AI "agent factory." In the early days of Microsoft, cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen had ambitions to create the world's first "software factory," a company full of programmers who would build everything from applications to operating systems. Parikh said he met with Gates and discussed his own concept, a production line for AI agents and applications. "Building our vision demands this type of culture — one where Al is embedded in how we think, design, and deliver," Parikh wrote in an April 14 email to his team. "The Agent Factory reflects this shift — not just in what we build, but in how we build it together. If we want every developer (and everyone) to shape the future, we have to get there first." The memos reveal some of the developments at CoreAI since Parikh's arrival. Since January, Foundry — Microsoft's AI platform for developers — has "delivered $337 million of favorable COGS (cost of goods sold) impact year-to-date, with a projected $606 million on an annualized basis," according to one of Parikh's memos. Microsoft won new customers for its AI programming tool GitHub Copilot, deploying "5,000+ Copilot Business seats" for Fidelity with 5,000 more expected, another memo stated. Copilot Business sells for $19 per user per month, which would make the deal worth as much as $2.28 million annually at full price, though customers often get discounts for large deals. Fidelity declined to comment. Startup Harvey AI, meanwhile, has agreed to a two-year $150 million commitment to consume Azure cloud services, according to one of Parikh's memos. Harvey AI declined to comment. Making Microsoft think macro The memos viewed by BI show how Parikh appears to be taking seriously his mandate to introduce a new perspective to the company and fix procedural problems that Microsoft may not be able to see that it has. In a May 10 email to his team, Parikh said shifting the company's culture is "essential" to its future, and outlined progress toward priorities like accelerating the pace at which employees work, breaking down siloes to work better as one team, and making products more reliable and secure. "One of my early observations coming into Microsoft is that we sometimes treat symptoms rather than systems," Parikh wrote in a May 5 email. "We often focus too much on the micro, which results in band-aids and bolt-ons vs taking a broader system view (which may mean thinking beyond what one team directly owns). This often leads to more complexity and operational burden. We'll help each other get better at this." Parikh's plan to get Microsoft to focus on the macro is to create a "learning loop" with a debrief after every product launch, incident, customer meeting, internal meeting, or decision. He's started new processes to make this happen, according to the memos. Parikh has an "Ops Review" series, going team by team to make specific improvements but also to "find common patterns of engineering pain that need broader improvements," he wrote. The reviews, he explained, focus on longer-term operational metrics to help with strategy. "We are zooming out and taking a more end-to-end view of a team's operational setup, creating space for an open discussion around what's working and what's not." The reviews began in April with the App Services team. Also among Parikh's mandates: more customer focus. His organization is required to conduct reviews of major incidents, like outages, that could impact customers, and chart how quickly the teams identified the problem and deployed a fix. He also started "get well plans" for unhappy customers after he "encountered a couple of fairly unhappy customers" in recent meetings, according to an April 26 email. His solution? Weekly reviews to "understand where we went off track, identify solutions, and execute the recovery plan," tracking progress until the accounts "get well again." What Parikh thinks Microsoft should change so far In the May 5 email, Parikh shared "several recurring themes and insights" within Microsoft that he believes the company should seek to change or simplify. First, he encouraged his organization to engage engineers from outside their direct team because "different perspectives help." In his view, Microsoft also takes too long and the process is too hard to deprecate, or discourage use of, old versions of software. "Supporting too many versions is unattainable," Parikh wrote. "We are following up with C+Al (the Cloud + AI organization, under Scott Guthrie) to brainstorm how we can modernize and streamline this." Incident reviews are overloaded with metrics that don't have enough value, Parikh wrote, and Microsoft sends out too many alerts, which creates noise. "It's important to periodically zoom out and audit how your monitoring is running and to simplify if you are overloaded on alerts and metrics. Use Al to help triage complex alerting situations," he urged. Parikh encouraged his teams to "see the forest for the trees on scalability," and to organize brainstorming sessions when faced with a traffic load they can't support to see what it would take to support five or 10 times as much traffic. "You may be stuck in a local maxima with incremental improvements, and it might be time to brainstorm how you can get a step function more scale," he wrote. He also recommended employees seek to address classes of problems, not just one-offs. "Quick fixes lead to complexity," Parikh wrote. "Instead of band-aids, we should aim for broader system improvements that solve whole categories of issues and boost long-term efficiency." "We're building muscle in spotting patterns, not just patching symptoms," Parikh wrote. "And that's a big deal."

Microsoft reportedly blocking emails with 'Palestine' or 'Gaza' as keywords
Microsoft reportedly blocking emails with 'Palestine' or 'Gaza' as keywords

Express Tribune

time22-05-2025

  • Business
  • Express Tribune

Microsoft reportedly blocking emails with 'Palestine' or 'Gaza' as keywords

Microsoft employees have reported that emails containing the terms 'Palestine,' 'Gaza' and 'genocide' are being temporarily blocked from reaching recipients both inside and outside the company. The No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) protest group, representing concerned Microsoft workers, said dozens of employees have faced restrictions when sending emails with these words in the subject line or body. NOAA organisers noted that variations such as 'Israel' or altered spellings like 'P4lestine' do not trigger the block, raising concerns that Microsoft leadership is censoring speech and discriminating against Palestinian workers and their allies. Microsoft confirmed to The Verge, who first reported the story, that it has introduced measures aimed at reducing the volume of 'politically focused emails' sent within the company. Microsoft employees have discovered that any emails they send with the terms 'Palestine' or 'Gaza' are getting temporarily blocked from being sent. Microsoft confirmed to The Verge that it has implemented some form of email changes. Details 👇 — Tom Warren (@tomwarren) May 22, 2025 Spokesperson Frank Shaw said: 'Emailing large numbers of employees about any topic not related to work is not appropriate. We have an established forum for employees who have opted in to political issues. Over the past couple of days, a number of politically focused emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in.' The email blocks come amid a week of protests by current and former Microsoft employees against the company's contracts with the Israeli government during the Build developer conference. On Monday, employee Joe Lopez disrupted CEO Satya Nadella's keynote address, accusing Microsoft of enabling 'Israeli war crimes' through its Azure cloud services. After sending a mass email to thousands of employees, Lopez was dismissed. Microsoft Employee Calls Out CEO for Supporting Israel — Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani) May 20, 2025 Protests continued on Tuesday when a Palestinian tech worker interrupted a CoreAI presentation, and on Wednesday two former employees disrupted a Build session. During the disruptions, a Microsoft executive inadvertently revealed internal messages about Walmart's use of AI. These protests follow Microsoft's recent statement defending its cloud and AI contracts with Israel, saying internal and external reviews found 'no evidence' that its tools were used to 'target or harm people' in Gaza.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store