By default, every quantum computer is going to be a hybrid that combines quantum and classical compute. Microsoft estimates that a quantum computer that will be able to help solve some of the world’s most pressing questions will require at least a million stable qubits. It’ll take massive classical compute power — which is really only available in the cloud — to control a machine like this and handle the error correction algorithms needed to keep it stable. Indeed, Microsoft estimates that to achieve the necessary fault tolerance, a quantum computer will need to be integrated with a peta-scale compute platform that can manage between ten to one hundred terabits per second of data moving between the quantum and classical machine. At the American Physical Society March Meeting in Las Vegas, Microsoft today is showing off some of the work it has been doing on enabling this and launching what it calls the “Integrated Hybrid” feature in Azure Quantum.

“With this Integrated Hybrid feature, you can start to use — within your quantum applications — classical code right alongside quantum code,” Krysta Svore, Microsoft’s VP of Advanced Quantum Development, told me.  “It’s mixing that classical and quantum code together that unlocks new types, new styles of quantum algorithms, prototypes, sub routines, if you will, where you can control what you do to qubits based on classical information. This is a first in the industry.”

Image Credits: Microsoft

This, she argued, is a step in bringing classical and quantum computing together, but also in enabling new error correction protocols. Without this massive amount of classical compute, it won’t be possible — at least in the foreseeable future — to effectively control a quantum machine.

“Arguably, the only place you will be able to have scaled-up quantum machines, scaled-up quantum computing will be in a public cloud because it’s that critical to have that level of scale of classical computing integrated with the quantum machine,” Svore explained. She describes the process as a dance, where the classical compute helps choreograph a million qubits to work together simultaneously, “all doing their little square dance — or hexagon dance, whatever it may be.” But to do that, you have to talk to all of these qubits simultaneously, which necessitates these massive compute and bandwidth requirements.

Svore also argues that it takes a lot of classical compute to build the algorithms that are then sent over to the quantum machine — which may then also take weeks to run a given computation (and that feedback loop may happen numerous times, too).

With this new Integrated Hybrid feature then, Microsoft is giving developers — and researchers — the tools to look at what this combination between quantum and classical looks like in practice. Specifically, Svore told me, it’ll enable them to run a version of the phase estimation algorithm, for example, which is a key algorithm in the quantum computing toolkit. Researchers will soon be able to use Quantinuum hardware available in Azure to test this and then have the classical computer react to data coming back from the quantum machine, for example. Until now, a lot of this was theoretical, but now it’ll be possible to do it in hardware.

Over time, the role of classical computing in enabling quantum computing has become more widely understood in the industry. Microsoft, of course, argues that its massive cloud will enable it to deliver the kind of classical compute power needed to control these machines. It’s obviously not the only player in the market, with Amazon, Google, IBM and others also being able to integrate quantum processors into their massive data centers as well.

Microsoft makes it easier to integrate quantum and classical computing by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Barely two weeks after launching the new AI-enabled Bing on desktop (and a few ups and downs during that time), Microsoft today announced that the new Bing is now also available in the Bing mobile app and through Microsoft’s Edge browser for Android and iOS. With that, you can now also use voice input to interact with Bing’s chat mode. Also new is an integration with Skype, Microsoft’s messaging app, which will now allow you to bring Bing into a text conversation to add additional information.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The fact that Microsoft is bringing the new Bing to mobile isn’t exactly a surprise. The company, after all, gives users who install the mobile Bing app priority on its waitlist for gaining access to the new features. The Skype integration wasn’t necessarily on everybody’s radar, though, in part because it often feels like Microsoft has forgotten about Skype, even though the service still has 36 million daily users, according to the company.

With this new integration (which is now in preview), you can add Bing to any chat (using the “@Bing” command) and ask it the same kinds of questions you would ask in the regular chat mode. One nifty feature here is that you can choose if you want your answers to appear as bullet points, text or in the form of a “simplified response,” as Microsoft calls it. That’s actually a feature I’d like to see in the regular Bing chat, too.

If this sounds a bit familiar, it may be because you are one of the few people to remember Google’s Allo, that company’s ill-fated attempt at an AI-enhanced messaging app. In Allo, too, users could chat with the Google Assistant and bring it into conversations, though this was 2016 and large language models like GPT-3 weren’t a thing yet, so its capabilities were limited (though in return, it wouldn’t just hallucinate answers either).

As for the mobile apps, there are no real surprises here. The addition of voice search is a nice bonus for when you’re mobile. As a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed, you’ll be able to dictate your questions and Bing will also use Microsoft’s text-to-speech technology to read the answer back to you. We’ll still have to see what Bing sounds like, though. Microsoft gave up on its Cortana voice assistant in recent years (and Bing specifically notes that it is “not an assistant), but there can be little doubt that these large language models make a compelling use case for voice assistants, which have long waited for a killer feature beyond setting timers.

It’s no secret that Microsoft had to curtail Bing’s original functionality quite a bit in recent days as users pushed the system well beyond what the company had tested for. And while I’ve definitely done that, too, I’ve also found the new Bing to be quite useful in my day-to-day interactions with it. It’s still very early days for tools like this and thankfully, Microsoft has shown itself to be quite responsive to its critics — even though I’m saddened that it is now restricting users to only six turns per conversation and 60 queries total per day.

Image Credits: Microsoft

Microsoft brings the new AI-powered Bing to mobile and Skype, gives it a voice by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Windows 11 offers a remarkable user experience with its impressive visuals, stylish animations, and amazing features. Unfortunately, the high system requirements needed for all these new features have resulted in a significant decrease in overall computer performance. In this blog post, we provide you with the steps to adjust your Windows 11 settings and improve its speed and performance.

Make sure you have the latest Windows updates and device drivers

Keeping your Windows 11 updated will ensure you have the latest device drivers, which are vital in boosting your computer’s performance. To check for the latest Windows 11 updates, follow the instructions below:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Windows update > Check for updates.
2. Choose one of the following options:
• If your computer is up to date, then continue checking for optional updates.
• If the system says “Updates are available once they are downloaded”, click on Install now.
3. Choose the updates you want to install, and click Install.
4. Restart your computer.

When checking for optional updates, follow these steps:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Windows update > Advanced options > Optional updates.
2. If optional updates are available, select the ones you need and click Download & Install.
3. Restart your computer.

Use ReadyBoost

ReadyBoost enables you to enhance your computer’s speed and effectiveness without having to upgrade its physical memory. All you need is a removable drive like a USB flash drive with at least 500 MB of free space and a high data transfer rate. Here are the steps for using ReadyBoost.

1. Insert a USB flash drive into your computer.
2. Click on the File Explorer icon on the taskbar.
3. Right-click on the USB flash drive and choose Properties.
4. Click on the ReadyBoost tab and choose Use this device. Windows will check if the USB drive can use ReadyBoost, and will inform you if it can’t.
5. After Windows calculates the amount of free space needed to optimize memory, click OK to reserve this space for ReadyBoost.

Take note that you can’t use ReadyBoost if you installed Windows 11 on a solid state drive (SSD). This is because SSDs are already fast, and ReadyBoost will have little to no effect on their performance.

Adjust the visual settings of Windows 11

Windows 11 uses animations, shadows, and other visual effects for some of its elements. While these make the UI appear more fluid, they require additional system resources which can reduce overall performance, especially if your computer has limited memory. Here’s how you can adjust the visual settings of Windows 11 for better performance.

1. Click on Search on the taskbar and type performance.
2. On the search results page, choose Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows.
3. On the Visual effects tabs, choose Adjust for best performance, then click on Apply.
4. Restart your computer.

Disable startup programs you don’t use

When you turn on your computer, some applications start automatically and run in the background. This is convenient for programs that are used often, but programs that are hardly used can increase the booting time of Windows 11. To fix this issue, you can disable any unused programs during startup by following these steps:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Apps > Startup.
2. On the Startup Apps page, select the programs you don’t want to start automatically and set the button next to them to Off.

Check for malware

A virus or malware can have a negative impact on your computer’s performance. The signs of an infection include pop-up messages, programs that start on their own, and the hard drive constantly running in the background.

You can use Windows Security (formerly Windows Defender Security Center) to scan your computer for signs of a malware infection. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Privacy & Security > Windows Security > Open Windows Security.
2. Click on Virus & threat protection > Protection updates.
3. Click on Check for updates to ensure you have the latest updates.
4. Go back to the Virus & threat protection screen and choose Quick Scan, then wait for Windows to finish scanning.

If Windows finds a virus or malware, it will ask you to either remove or quarantine it. In case the virus or malware can’t be removed or quarantined, you should contact Microsoft support for additional assistance. If you’re using third-party antivirus software, you should refer to that program’s documentation on how to scan and remove malware from your computer.

For more tips on how to optimize Windows, give our experts a call today.

Microsoft Windows 11 is filled with useful features. However, some users have experienced decreased performance on their PCs or laptops after upgrading from Windows 10. In this article, we’ll give you tips on how to optimize the speed and performance of your Windows 11 computer.

Make sure you have the latest Windows updates and device drivers

Keeping your Windows 11 updated will ensure you have the latest device drivers, which are vital in boosting your computer’s performance. To check for the latest Windows 11 updates, follow the instructions below:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Windows update > Check for updates.
2. Choose one of the following options:
• If your computer is up to date, then continue checking for optional updates.
• If the system says “Updates are available once they are downloaded”, click on Install now.
3. Choose the updates you want to install, and click Install.
4. Restart your computer.

When checking for optional updates, follow these steps:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Windows update > Advanced options > Optional updates.
2. If optional updates are available, select the ones you need and click Download & Install.
3. Restart your computer.

Use ReadyBoost

ReadyBoost enables you to enhance your computer’s speed and effectiveness without having to upgrade its physical memory. All you need is a removable drive like a USB flash drive with at least 500 MB of free space and a high data transfer rate. Here are the steps for using ReadyBoost.

1. Insert a USB flash drive into your computer.
2. Click on the File Explorer icon on the taskbar.
3. Right-click on the USB flash drive and choose Properties.
4. Click on the ReadyBoost tab and choose Use this device. Windows will check if the USB drive can use ReadyBoost, and will inform you if it can’t.
5. After Windows calculates the amount of free space needed to optimize memory, click OK to reserve this space for ReadyBoost.

Take note that you can’t use ReadyBoost if you installed Windows 11 on a solid state drive (SSD). This is because SSDs are already fast, and ReadyBoost will have little to no effect on their performance.

Adjust the visual settings of Windows 11

Windows 11 uses animations, shadows, and other visual effects for some of its elements. While these make the UI appear more fluid, they require additional system resources which can reduce overall performance, especially if your computer has limited memory. Here’s how you can adjust the visual settings of Windows 11 for better performance.

1. Click on Search on the taskbar and type performance.
2. On the search results page, choose Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows.
3. On the Visual effects tabs, choose Adjust for best performance, then click on Apply.
4. Restart your computer.

Disable startup programs you don’t use

When you turn on your computer, some applications start automatically and run in the background. This is convenient for programs that are used often, but programs that are hardly used can increase the booting time of Windows 11. To fix this issue, you can disable any unused programs during startup by following these steps:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Apps > Startup.
2. On the Startup Apps page, select the programs you don’t want to start automatically and set the button next to them to Off.

Check for malware

A virus or malware can have a negative impact on your computer’s performance. The signs of an infection include pop-up messages, programs that start on their own, and the hard drive constantly running in the background.

You can use Windows Security (formerly Windows Defender Security Center) to scan your computer for signs of a malware infection. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Privacy & Security > Windows Security > Open Windows Security.
2. Click on Virus & threat protection > Protection updates.
3. Click on Check for updates to ensure you have the latest updates.
4. Go back to the Virus & threat protection screen and choose Quick Scan, then wait for Windows to finish scanning.

If Windows finds a virus or malware, it will ask you to either remove or quarantine it. In case the virus or malware can’t be removed or quarantined, you should contact Microsoft support for additional assistance. If you’re using third-party antivirus software, you should refer to that program’s documentation on how to scan and remove malware from your computer.

For more tips on how to optimize Windows, give our experts a call today.

If you’ve made the switch to Windows 11, then you are familiar with its new features, effects, and animations. You’ve also probably noticed that upgrading to Windows 11 resulted in a decrease in PC performance. To help improve your system’s speed and optimize your Windows 11 experience, follow the useful tips and tricks we’ve outlined below.

Make sure you have the latest Windows updates and device drivers

Keeping your Windows 11 updated will ensure you have the latest device drivers, which are vital in boosting your computer’s performance. To check for the latest Windows 11 updates, follow the instructions below:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Windows update > Check for updates.
2. Choose one of the following options:
• If your computer is up to date, then continue checking for optional updates.
• If the system says “Updates are available once they are downloaded”, click on Install now.
3. Choose the updates you want to install, and click Install.
4. Restart your computer.

When checking for optional updates, follow these steps:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Windows update > Advanced options > Optional updates.
2. If optional updates are available, select the ones you need and click Download & Install.
3. Restart your computer.

Use ReadyBoost

ReadyBoost enables you to enhance your computer’s speed and effectiveness without having to upgrade its physical memory. All you need is a removable drive like a USB flash drive with at least 500 MB of free space and a high data transfer rate. Here are the steps for using ReadyBoost.

1. Insert a USB flash drive into your computer.
2. Click on the File Explorer icon on the taskbar.
3. Right-click on the USB flash drive and choose Properties.
4. Click on the ReadyBoost tab and choose Use this device. Windows will check if the USB drive can use ReadyBoost, and will inform you if it can’t.
5. After Windows calculates the amount of free space needed to optimize memory, click OK to reserve this space for ReadyBoost.

Take note that you can’t use ReadyBoost if you installed Windows 11 on a solid state drive (SSD). This is because SSDs are already fast, and ReadyBoost will have little to no effect on their performance.

Adjust the visual settings of Windows 11

Windows 11 uses animations, shadows, and other visual effects for some of its elements. While these make the UI appear more fluid, they require additional system resources which can reduce overall performance, especially if your computer has limited memory. Here’s how you can adjust the visual settings of Windows 11 for better performance.

1. Click on Search on the taskbar and type performance.
2. On the search results page, choose Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows.
3. On the Visual effects tabs, choose Adjust for best performance, then click on Apply.
4. Restart your computer.

Disable startup programs you don’t use

When you turn on your computer, some applications start automatically and run in the background. This is convenient for programs that are used often, but programs that are hardly used can increase the booting time of Windows 11. To fix this issue, you can disable any unused programs during startup by following these steps:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Apps > Startup.
2. On the Startup Apps page, select the programs you don’t want to start automatically and set the button next to them to Off.

Check for malware

A virus or malware can have a negative impact on your computer’s performance. The signs of an infection include pop-up messages, programs that start on their own, and the hard drive constantly running in the background.

You can use Windows Security (formerly Windows Defender Security Center) to scan your computer for signs of a malware infection. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Start > Settings > Privacy & Security > Windows Security > Open Windows Security.
2. Click on Virus & threat protection > Protection updates.
3. Click on Check for updates to ensure you have the latest updates.
4. Go back to the Virus & threat protection screen and choose Quick Scan, then wait for Windows to finish scanning.

If Windows finds a virus or malware, it will ask you to either remove or quarantine it. In case the virus or malware can’t be removed or quarantined, you should contact Microsoft support for additional assistance. If you’re using third-party antivirus software, you should refer to that program’s documentation on how to scan and remove malware from your computer.

For more tips on how to optimize Windows, give our experts a call today.

The tech layoffs keep on coming. Microsoft-owned GitHub today announced that it is laying off 10% of its staff through the end of the company’s fiscal year. Before this announcement, GitHub had about 3,000 employees. The company will also shutter all of its offices as their leases end, in part because of their low utilization, and move to a remote-first culture.

GitHub will also continue its hiring freeze, which it first announced in January, and also make a number of other internal changes to “protect the short-term health” of its business.

“We announced a number of difficult but necessary decisions and budgetary realignments to both protect the health of our business in the short term and grant us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy moving forward. You can view our CEO’s full message to employees with additional details on these changes below,” a company spokesperson told us.

In a move that’s a bit unorthodox for a company that has prided itself on remaining independent of its corporate owner, GitHub is also moving from Slack to Teams for its video conferencing needs. And as another sign of cost cutting, it’s moving its laptop refresh cycle from three to four years.

“Although our entire leadership team has carefully deliberated this step and come to agreement, ultimately, as CEO the decision is mine. I recognize this will be difficult on you all, and we will approach this period with the utmost respect for every Hubber,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke wrote in an email to the company’s staff today.

He notes that he wants the company to become the “developer-first engineering system for the world of tomorrow,” with a strong focus on AI. Given GitHub’s recent focus on its Copilot and the overall shift at Microsoft toward AI-everything, that’s maybe not unexpected.

Here is the full email Dohmke sent to the company earlier today:

GitHub CEO Message to Employees on February 9, 2023

Today, we are announcing a number of difficult decisions, including saying goodbye to some Hubbers and enacting new budgetary realignments, designed to protect the short-term health of our business while also granting us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy. With great respect for Hubbers, I first want to be clear about why we are making these decisions and what it means for GitHub’s future.

Sustained growth is important for every business. For GitHub, this means that we continue to enable more productive developers across the globe and move quickly as our opportunities to help our customers change. Today, we are the home of 100M developers, and we must become the developer-first engineering system for the world of tomorrow. The age of AI has started and we have been leading this change with GitHub Copilot, our most successful product launch to date. We have an enormous opportunity to build an integrated, AI-powered GitHub with urgency. We must continue to help our customers grow and thrive with GitHub, expedite and simplify their cloud adoption journey, while supporting them every day. This will require strong focus and changes to how and where we invest our finite resources.

To start, we will align our work with the areas where we can best impact these goals and our customers’ needs across all of our products. Unfortunately, this will include changes that will result in a reduction of GitHub’s workforce by up to 10% through the end of FY23. A number of Hubbers will receive notifications today, others will follow as we are re-aligning the business through the end of FY23. The hiring pause that I announced on January 18 remains in effect.

Although our entire leadership team has carefully deliberated this step and come to agreement, ultimately, as CEO the decision is mine. I recognize this will be difficult on you all, and we will approach this period with the utmost respect for every Hubber. We will speak with impacted Hubbers so that they understand the transition compensation and COBRA/COBRA equivalent (outside the US) that will be provided. Career transition services assistance benefits will also be offered.

Additionally, we have been working to improve our operational efficiency and scale as a business. One of our decisions is to move toward a fully remote GitHub. We are seeing very low utilization rates in our offices around the world, and this decision is a testament to the success of our long-standing remote-first culture. We are not vacating offices immediately, but will move to close all of our offices as their leases end or as we are operationally able to do so. We will share more workplace details and transition plans with you as they are finalized.

We are looking at further reducing our operating costs. We will share details and transition plans with you in the coming months, but I wanted to share two decisions with you: i) Effective immediately, we will be moving laptop refreshes from three years to four years. ii) We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing, saving significant cost and simplifying cross-company and customer conversations. This move will be complete by September 1, 2023. We will remain on Slack as our day-to-day collaboration tool.

Finally, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to every single Hubber and their incredible talents that have helped GitHub grow to where we are today. Every commit you have made and every day you have worked has helped construct GitHub into the largest and most important software development platform. Thank you for your dedication, resilience, and passion to empower millions of software developers around the globe.

GitHub lays off 10% and goes fully remote by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

ChatGPT is getting all the attention as of late, but modern AI technologies have a range of use cases beyond finally making Bing useful. One emerging trend is putting AI to work to aid with the frustrating and laborious task of filing and auditing corporate expense reports. Today, Microsoft and American Express announced a deal that aims to do just that. The companies agreed to expand their decades-long partnership to build solutions that leverage Microsoft Cloud and AI technologies, starting with expense report management.

According to Amex, the initial solution will leverage machine learning and AI to automate expense reporting and approvals.

This goes beyond simply learning how to classify certain expenses, as many of today’s tools already do. Instead, the new system will implement an AI-powered decision engine that understands the company’s own travel and expense (T&E) policy and how it applies to submitted expenses. It will use that understanding along with other factors — like the employee’s purchase and payment history — to categorize and assign a risk score to individual transactions.

To make this work, the employee will be prompted to snap a photo of their receipt after paying with their Corporate Amex card. The system will then apply one of three risk scores: red, yellow or green, based on whether the expense is recommended for automatic approval or not, or if it needs another look. This information is passed along to the company’s expense management system with the receipt details attached to automatically generate reports for managers and auditors to use in their own decision-making. Amex says the AI is something it built in-house — it’s not leveraging Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, as Bing is, but is using Microsoft Cloud.

Over time, the expense management system will get smarter thanks to machine learning. As more expenses flow through the system, it will improve its algorithms around what sort of expenses can be automatically approved.

Microsoft will be the solution’s first tester and will integrate it with its own internal expense system later in the year, American Express notes. Over time, it will roll out to more Amex Corporate clients and add support for more expense management tools.

While it’s not exactly ChatGPT for expense reports, if successful, the solution could save time and reduce headaches around corporate expense management.

Imagine, instead of spending hours manually categorizing expenses, uploading receipts and justifying the charges, corporate employees would only have to focus on the outliers that actually required further explanation.

Of course, it remains to be seen if the solution is capable of actually accomplishing this goal, as described, or if corporations will even utilize the tech when it becomes available.

Amex also isn’t the only company looking to AI to improve the tedious processes around expense report management. Just days ago, Palo Alto-based business-travel software maker TripActions rebranded to Navan and announced it would integrate ChatGPT into its platform for similar reasons. The company said its new system would learn a user’s preferred airlines, hotels and restaurants to build itineraries and will streamline expense reporting through its own receipt-scanning tool, among other things.

There’s reason, of course, to be skeptical of these forthcoming AI solutions.

As The Atlantic recently pointed out, new technologies meant to reduce employee labor inevitably just create “new types of work” for people to do instead. And ChatGPT’s way of confidently providing the wrong answer suggests some of that extra work may involve dealing with false positives and negatives.

Plus, other companies have been leveraging AI for some time, like SAP Concur. And many employees would argue that Concur isn’t exactly a user-friendly system.

The timing of the announcement is suspect, as well. Amex is likely hoping to ride on the wave of interest in the Microsoft-OpenAI deal and the ChatGPT-powered Bing to get more eyeballs on its far less exciting use case. (Unless, of course, expense management thrills you!)

Still, AI is on its way to the broader financial services and corporate travel industry, not just expense management. In that respect, Amex isn’t necessarily getting out ahead of the market, it’s just keeping up with where it’s headed.

Amex and Microsoft turn to AI to make expense reports less horrible by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

This week’s news about Microsoft’s plan to add ChatGPT-like capabilities to its search engine Bing has sent its companion mobile app into the App Store’s Top Charts as of Wednesday. On the U.S. App Store, the Bing app has surged to the No. 12 spot among all free iPhone apps, while Microsoft’s Edge browser is now the No. 3 Utility app. Globally, the Bing app has seen a 10x increase in new downloads, according to preliminary estimates from app intelligence firm data.ai.

The movement indicates there’s sizable consumer demand for these new AI experiences, and users are even potentially willing to try new search engines and other browsers in order to gain access.

On Tuesday, Microsoft first showed off the new Bing.com which included the highly anticipated integration of a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model. The update adds a ChatGPT-like experience within the search engine itself, allowing users to converse with an AI chatbot for help with more complex queries and to aid in select content creation tasks — like writing a LinkedIn post. Microsoft also demonstrated a new version of its Edge web browser with the same AI features built into the sidebar for easy access.

But while the new version Bing has now technically launched, it’s still in a limited preview for the time being.

Users who want to try out the new AI features have to first join a waitlist. Microsoft said that “millions” of users will be invited from the waitlist over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, the company cleverly introduced a way to move up its waitlist. On a landing page, Microsoft suggests that users can gain quicker access to the new Bing if they complete a couple of additional steps. This includes setting Microsoft’s search as the default on their PC and scanning a QR code to install the Microsoft Bing App on their smartphone.

Image Credits: Bing waitlist website

The latter has clearly inspired the app’s rapid climb up the App Store’s charts — and it’s been a dramatic rise, at that.

Ahead of Microsoft’s AI news, Bing was not a popular app by any stretch. As of last week, for example, the app was ranked No. 160 on the U.S. App Store’s Productivity apps chart — in other words, practically invisible. It wasn’t ranked on the U.S. App Store’s Top Overall Charts at all. In less than a week’s time, it’s nearing the top 10 in the U.S. as is the No. 2 Productivity app, as of the time of writing.

Image Credits: data.ai chart of Bing’s app movement

If the consumer demand wasn’t there, Bing’s app wouldn’t have moved this significantly, despite Microsoft’s push to download it.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that the App Store’s charts are susceptible to being manipulated by a rush of new downloads in a compressed period of time — which is why TikTok marketing that makes apps “go viral” has become so effective. Still, the Bing app’s movement is an interesting signal that demonstrates the demand for AI as well as the potential threat to Google.

Google is already paying Apple billions per year to be the default search engine in Safari. But if a large number of consumers move to another web search app like Bing or Edge in order to try out the new AI capabilities, Google could lose market share on one of the largest platforms consumers use to browse the web.

It’s possible, too, that some portion of the Bing app’s new users believe they’ll have access to the AI features from the mobile app. To be clear, that’s not yet the case as of yet. And though the app was recently updated, Microsoft makes no promises about using AI from this native iOS experience in Bing’s App Store description.

In addition to downloading Bing, as prompted by Microsoft’s website, some users may have downloaded Microsoft’s Edge browser on their iPhone, as well. While the Edge app hasn’t moved up the charts as quickly as Bing, it’s now No. 3 on the U.S. App Store’s Top Charts for Utilities, a slight bump from the No. 7 position it held Monday.

More specific figures around the total new installs may become available in the weeks ahead. If that’s the case, we’ll update with those numbers.

Bing’s app sees a 10x jump in downloads after Microsoft’s AI news by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

At a Microsoft press event today where the company demonstrated its new A.I.-powered search capabilities in Bing, the company also announced a new version of its Edge web browser that includes A.I. technologies built-in. With the new browser, web users are able to do things like summarize search results with A.I.’s help and converse with A.I. chatbots to get their questions answered, among other things.

“It’s sleeker, it’s lighter,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft Corporate VP, when demonstrating the new version of the browser, which now sports a few aesthetic changes, like rounded corners.

Similar to the updates coming to Bing, an A.I. chatbot is available in a sidebar in Edge and includes two functionalities at launch: chat and compose.

Image Credits: Microsoft event photo via TechCrunch

These can be combined to help users do things like summarize lengthy web content, run comparisons, or even create content, in some cases.

Mehdi showed off how Edge’s A.I. powers could be put to use in a handful of demos during the event. In one, he visited the Gap website to look up the quarterly reports and earnings. He clicks a link to view the Q3 report and it pulls up a 15-page PDF.

“It’s pretty long. I won’t have time to read all that. What I’d love is a summary of the key points,” he says.

Then, with a click, he opens up a chatbot from the top of the browser and asks it to give him the most important takeaways from the page. The A.I. returns a summary promptly, representing a “massive time savings,” Mehdi notes.

What’s more impressive, however, is what the A.I. does next. He has it compare the Gap Q3 financials to Lululemon’s Q3 and make a table with its findings.

Image Credits: Microsoft event photo via TechCrunch

In another demo, he showed off how the A.I. could be used alongside the developer resources on the Stack Overflow website. He shows how a developer who was researching tips on how to parse a JSON file finds a code snippet they want to use. But the code is in Python and the developer wants it in Rust.

To get help with this from the A.I., Mehdi highlights the text which then brings it up in Edge’s new sidebar, then instructs the A.I. to write the code in Rust. It does.

In a final example, Mehdi demonstrates using the A.I. in the sidebar to write a LinkedIn post. (And you thought the corporate posts sounded like bots now!).

In this case, he gives the A.I. a few prompts to get it started. You can also ask to refine the post by tone, format, or length, and Edge understands and updates the draft accordingly.

The news about Edge was announced alongside the anticipated arrival of OpenAI’s technologies in the Bing search engine, following Microsoft’s $1 billion investment into OpenAI. At the event, Microsoft revealed how it integrated OpenAI’s GPT-4 model into its search engine to provide users with a ChatGPT-like experience. Except in Bing’s case, the A.I. isn’t limited only to data covering up to 2021 — it’s capable of handling queries related to more recent events.

Alongside these A.I. updates to Bing, the updated Edge browser will be available to preview today.

“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft Chairman and CEO, in an announcement. “Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”

Microsoft updates its Edge web browser with built-in A.I. capabilities by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

“It’s a new day for search,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said today. For 13 years now, Microsoft has tried to get you to use Bing, but you didn’t want to, so its global market share remains in the low single digits. Now, the company is pulling out all the stops in an effort to better compete with Google. Today, at a press event in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft announced its long-rumored integration of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model into Bing, providing a ChatGPT-like experience within the search engine.

The company is also launching a new version of its Edge browser today, with these new AI features built into the sidebar.

The new experience is now live on Bing, but it’s still somewhat limited. For the full experience, you’ll have to get on the waitlist.

As expected, the new Bing now features the option to start a chat in its toolbar, which then brings you to a ChatGPT-like conversational experience. One major point to note here is that while OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot was trained on data that only covers to 2021, Bing’s version is far more up-to-date and can handle queries related to far more recent events (think today, not 2021).

Image Credits: TechCrunch/Frederic Lardinois

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted, the team wants to stay true to its AI Principles and acknowledged that, as with every new technology, it’s important to remain cognizant of the potentially negative consequences. “It’s about being also clear-eyed about the unintended consequences of any new technology,” he said. He stressed that Microsoft wants to use technology that enhances human productivity and that is aligned with human values.

Nadella noted that he believes this technology will reshape “pretty much every software category” and stressed that a technology like this has the potential to reshape the web. In his view, every computer interaction in the future will be mediated through an agent. The first stage of this, at least for Microsoft, is search.

As Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi noted, today’s search engines still works really well for navigational queries and those that are informational, asking for basic facts. But for more complex queries (“can you recommend a five-day itinerary for Mexico city?”), which make up half of today’s queries, modern search engines fail.

As for the new Bing experiences, Microsoft will show these GPT-based results in a box on the right side of the search results page. These will pop up when you search for facts that Bing knows the answer to.

But then there’s also the more ChatGPT-like experience for questions that are a bit more vague and that don’t have an exact answer. The only other major difference you’ll likely note right away is that Bing will occasionally try to prompt you with its own questions, too, and suggest potential answers to those questions. Microsoft’s model is clearly far more up-to-date compared to what ChatGPT currently offers. This includes pricing data, for example, or the ability to use recent data for travel tips and itineraries — and it’ll also happily write you an email to share this itinerary with your family.

Another important feature here — and one that I think we’ll see in most of these tools — is that Bing cites its sources and links to them in a “learn more” section at the end of its answers. Every result will also include a feedback option.

It’s also worth stressing that the old, link-centric version of Bing isn’t going away. You can still use it just like before, but now enhanced with AI.

Microsoft stressed that it is using a new version of GPT that is able to provide more relevant answers, annotate these and provide up-to-date results, all while providing a safer user experience. It calls this the Prometheus model. What Microsoft is essentially doing here is taking the OpenAI models and then wrap Prometheus and other Bing technologies around it.

Microsoft obviously has a very close relationship with OpenAI. After its initial $1 billion investment, the company recently announced that it would invest even more and extend its partnership with OpenAI, which in turn led to today’s announcement. And while Bing was always a competent search engine (and arguably better than most people ever gave it credit for), it never really gained mainstream traction. It was always good enough, but that doesn’t give users a reason to switch. ChatGPT may offer this reason — at least until Google rolls out its competitor to a wider audience.

Currently, there are no ads attached to chat feature of the ChatGPT function in the new Bing, but Microsoft noted that it will monetize these capabilities through ads.

Unlike Google, Microsoft doesn’t have a massive advertising empire to protect, so the company is likely willing to forgo some revenue in order to take market share from Google, which yesterday announced Bard, its competitor. Google, however, hasn’t offered a lot of details about how Bard will work and integrate into its search experience. For now, it’s only available to a select group of trusted testers.

One area that these systems are naturally geared toward is voice assistants. Like Microsoft is wont to do, it launched its Cortana voice assistant with a splash and positioned it as a competitor to Google’s Assistant and Siri. Like Bing, it was a competent product (more so than Samsung’s Bixby) that didn’t gain traction, so Microsoft slowly pulled back. In 2021, it re-positioned Cortana as the service that powers AI-based productivity experiences in Microsoft 365. The new Bing may now give Microsoft the tools to take on this market, too.

What all of this means for the future of the web and the financial health of online publishers who depend on people clicking on their links remains to be seen. It’s quite likely, though, that tools like this will result in fewer clicks and hence fewer ad dollars for publishers. This has the potential for a massive paradigm shift.

Microsoft launches the new Bing, with ChatGPT built in by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

It was a rough quarter for the cloud infrastructure market as companies looked for ways to cut back on spending in an uncertain economy. When you combine that with the strong dollar and a weak Chinese market, the market slowed to 21% growth, a precipitous drop from the 36% growth we had seen the year prior.

While we aren’t seeing the gaudy growth of years past, Synergy Research still found the market exceeded $61 billion for the quarter with the 12 month trailing revenues of over $212 billion, a hefty sum by any measure, even with the slowdown.

Also of note was that while each of The Big Three saw growth slow in Q4 2022 from the previous quarter, Microsoft still managed to gain market share ground on Amazon. Microsoft increased its share from 23%, up from 21% the prior quarter, while Amazon fell from 34% to 33% and Google remained steady at 11%. The Big Three cloud providers accounted for 66% of worldwide cloud revenue.

That comes out to approximately $20 billion for Amazon, $14 billion for Microsoft and $7 billion for Google. Per usual, this is looking at IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services. It doesn’t include SaaS, which is measured separately.

Image Credits: Synergy Research

Amazon cloud revenue grew a modest 20% over the prior year, and the company acknowledged in the earnings call that growth dropped even further to the mid-teens in the first month of the year. Meanwhile Microsoft reported cloud growth of 22%, down from 24% the prior quarter and Google Cloud revenue grew 32%, down from the 38% growth the previous quarter.

Amazon was first to market and has had a long head start, but it seems as the market slows after years of steady growth, it’s giving its chief competitor, Microsoft, a bit of an opening to gain on them. It could be partly due at least to the fact that Amazon’s market maturity is finally catching up to it, and Microsoft is able to gain some advantage in spite of spending slowing overall.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy says there were three key reasons for this quarter’s drop-off, which he believes are short-term issues, and he remains optimistic for the future. “There are three main factors. The strengthened US dollar diminishes the apparent growth rate of many non-US markets; the large Chinese market remains constrained by pandemic issues and local policies; and the worsened economy has caused some enterprises to more closely review spending on cloud services. These factors should be primarily short term in nature and Synergy forecasts that growth rates will remain strong over the next few years,” he said in a statement.

It will be interesting to watch the market in 2023 and see how the macro economic environment affects revenue, and if the slower growth we’ve been seeing continues to work in favor of Amazon’s competitors by enabling them to gain more ground.

Even as cloud infrastructure market growth slows, Microsoft continues to gain on Amazon by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

As the owner of a small- or medium-sized business (SMB), you may feel like you’re always stretched thin. You have to manage tight budgets, juggle multiple roles, and make sure your employees have the tools and resources they need to do their jobs. It can be tough to find time to focus on growing your business. But what if there was an all-in-one solution that could help you do it? Enter Microsoft 365.

Do more with less

Microsoft 365 is a comprehensive suite of tools and services designed to help SMBs get more done. It delivers the full power of Office apps, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, with the convenience of cloud-based collaboration. It also gives you access to features like secure file sharing, document workflow automation, and real-time communication. Best of all, Microsoft 365 is designed to work with the tools and services you already use.

With Microsoft 365, you can save time and money by eliminating the need for additional software or hardware. It’s easy to set up and manage, and it’s available at affordable price points. You can even use a single subscription to cover all the devices in your business, from PCs to phones to tablets.

Stay connected, wherever you are

By leveraging Microsoft 365, you can keep your team connected and engaged, regardless of their location. With cloud-based services like Microsoft Teams, you can have virtual meetings, chat with colleagues, and collaborate on projects in real time. And when you need to access files, emails, or other data while away from the office, you can do so securely with the Microsoft 365 mobile app.

Gain valuable insights with AI

Tools like Power BI and Azure AI enable you to gain valuable insights into your business. With Power BI, you can quickly create interactive dashboards that provide up-to-date information about the performance of your company. This can help you make better decisions and identify trends that could be a source of new opportunities.

Meanwhile, Azure AI allows you to leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve customer service, automate processes, and optimize your business operations.

Secure your data

Finally, Microsoft 365 offers a range of advanced security features that help protect your data and keep your business safe. These include multifactor authentication, data loss prevention, and encryption to keep sensitive information secure. And if you ever need assistance with any of these functions, Microsoft’s world-class support team is always on hand to help.

In today’s competitive world, it’s essential for SMBs to have the tools and resources they need to succeed. Microsoft 365 can help you do just that. With its easy setup, affordable pricing, and powerful features, it’s a great way to give your business an edge. Try it today and see the difference Microsoft 365 can make in your SMB’s growth.

Don’t know where to get started? Contact us today! We’re here to help you discover the full potential of Microsoft 365.