Microsoft’s latest gambit to snag much of the human talent from Inflection AI is causing waves this week. Redmond has previously invested in the company, but is now absorbing much of its staff into a new division it created for just that purpose.The subtext is clear enough: Microsoft doesn’t want to run into regulatory oversight in the form of anti-trust action. Such regulatory actions have been more common in recent years, scuppering megadeals like Visa-Plaid, and Adobe-Figma. Regardless of your perspectiv ...

Google hit with $270M fine in France as authority finds news publishers’ data was used for GeminiIn a never-ending saga between Google and France’s competition authority over copyright protections for news snippets, the Autorité de la Concurrence announced a €250 million fine against the tech giant Wednesday (around $270 million at today’s exchange rate).According to the competition watchdog, Google disregarded some of its previous commitments with news publishers. But the decision is especially notable bec ...

“I hope you realize this is not a concert,” said Nvidia president Jensen Huang to an audience so large, it filled up the SAP Center in San Jose. This is how he introduced what is perhaps the complete opposite of a concert: the company’s GTC event. “You have arrived at a developers conference. There will be a lot of science describing algorithms, computer architecture, mathematics. I sense a very heavy weight in the room; all of a sudden, you’re in the wrong place.”It may not have been a rock concert, but th ...

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) this week announced the launch of the similarly named Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA). The new initiative is designed to maintain development for and maintenance of open source robotics projects, with a particular focus on the OSRF’s own robot operating system (ROS).First released in 2007 by erstwhile Bay Area incubator Willow Garage, ROS has played a foundational role in robotics development for decades. In a show of support, Nvidia and Qualcomm have both sig ...

Microsoft has hired Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan, co-founders of high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, and several of their colleagues as the Satya Nadella-led cloud giant continues its aggressive push to attract top talent.Suleyman — also a co-founder of DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014 to bolster its own AI efforts — will run Microsoft’s newly formed unit called Microsoft AI, whereas Simonyan is joining the company as a chief scientist in the same new group. Mustafa, whose official title at M ...

India will lower import taxes on certain electric vehicles for companies committing to invest at least $500 million and setting up a local manufacturing facility within three years, a move that could potentially bolster Tesla’s plans to enter the South Asian market.Companies must invest a minimum of $500 million in the country and will have three years to establish local manufacturing for EVs with at least 25% of components sourced domestically, according to a government press release on Friday. Firms meeti ...

On Friday, Microsoft said Russian government hackers continue to break into its systems using information obtained during a hack last year. This time, the Russian hackers dubbed Midnight Blizzard have targeted Microsoft’s source code and other internal systems, the company said.“In recent weeks, we have seen evidence that Midnight Blizzard is using information initially exfiltrated from our corporate email systems to gain, or attempt to gain, unauthorized access. This has included access to some of the comp ...

Apple says it plans to make it easier for customers to switch to Android as a result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which went into force today. Alongside support for alternative app stores, new business terms for EU app developers, and mobile browser choice screens, among other things, the iPhone maker said it will also add to its data portability offerings, including a more “user-friendly” to move data from an iPhone to another non-Apple device.This solution is not yet available, but Apple is comm ...

The European Union has confirmed it’s looking into Apple’s decision to close Epic Games’ developer account — citing three separate regulations which may apply.Yesterday the Fortnite maker revealed Apple had terminated the account, apparently reversing a decision to approve the developer account last month.Epic had planned to launch its own app store, the Epic Games Stores, on iOS in Europe, as well as relaunching Fortnight on Apple’s platform. And it accused Apple of breaching the bloc’s Digital Markets Act ...

Accenture announced today that it would acquire the learning platform Udacity as part of an effort to build a learning platform focused on the growing interest in AI. While the company didn’t specify how much it paid for Udacity, it also announced a $1 billion investment in building a technology learning platform it’s calling LearnVantage.While it could also offer more general technology training, the company made clear that it is particularly interested in offering training to get workers up to speed on AI ...