Month: March 2024

Enlarge / Mustafa Suleyman, talks on Day 1 of the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park at Bletchley Park on November 1, 2023 in Bletchley, England. (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft has hired Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of Google’s DeepMind and chief executive of artificial intelligence startup Inflection, to run a new consumer AI unit.

Suleyman, a British entrepreneur who cofounded DeepMind in London in 2010, will report to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, the company announced on Tuesday. He will launch a division of Microsoft that brings consumer-facing products, including Microsoft’s Copilot, Bing, Edge, and GenAI under one team called Microsoft AI.

Nadella said in a statement on Tuesday: “I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions.”

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Last week, Microsoft announced that it would soon begin offering previews of Microsoft Office 2024, the next standalone perpetually licensed version of the Office suite. Like Office 2021 before it, Office 2024 will be part of Microsoft's Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), which is intended for IT administrators and users who value stability and predictability over constant iteration.

But Microsoft is being clearer than ever that it would really like people to move to using Microsoft 365 subscriptions, referring to Office 2024 as "a specialty product that Microsoft has committed to maintaining for use in exceptional circumstances." The company will be increasing prices for businesses by "up to 10 percent" compared to Office 2021, a price hike that Microsoft says will "support continued innovation in this niche space." Pricing for the consumer version of Office 2024 should stay the same as it is for Office 2021.

Office 2024 will receive support and security updates for five years from its release date, which will be "later this year," along with a new LTSC release of Windows 11. The company has also committed to releasing at least one more standalone version of Office in the future. If you bought Office 2021 and you're still happy with it, you'll still get support (including security updates) until October of 2026. Support for Office 2019 ended in October 2023.

Enlarge / You'll notice the Forest Stewardship Council's logo on the sidewall to the right of the Pirelli logo. (credit: Pirelli)

Formula 1 is on a big sustainability kick. The race cars are switching to carbon neutral synthetic fuels. Teams are improving their logistics to cut freight emissions. Race tracks are starting to run entirely on solar power. And now, the tires that Pirelli brings to the races have been given the seal of approval by an NGO as meeting its standards for sustainable forestry.

It will be hard to spot when the cars are moving, but this year, you'll find a tree logo on the sidewall. That indicates that the natural rubber that went into making the tire has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Natural rubber makes up about 15 percent of the rubber in an F1 tire, with the rest being synthetic.

According to the FSC, natural rubber is a key driver of deforestry, as well as human rights abuses, particularly among the smallholders who farm 85 percent of the world's natural rubber. By putting its logo on the tire, the FSC says that Pirelli has met "the world's most credible standards for sustainable forestry," protecting both the forests and the forest communities' rights, including fair wages.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Meta is considering cutting monthly subscription fees for Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union nearly in half to comply with the Digital Market Act (DMA), Reuters reported.

During a day-long public workshop on Meta's DMA compliance, Meta's competition and regulatory director, Tim Lamb, told the European Commission (EC) that individual subscriber fees could be slashed from 9.99 euros to 5.99 euros. Meta is hoping that reducing fees will help to speed up the EC's process for resolving Meta's compliance issues. If Meta's offer is accepted, any additional accounts would then cost 4 euros instead of 6 euros.

Lamb said that these prices are "by far the lowest end of the range that any reasonable person should be paying for services of these quality," calling it a "serious offer."