#Microsoft

Bing is the anti-AI search engine you should be using

PCWorld argues that Bing is a better choice than AI-heavy search engines because it surfaces human-authored content and links to original sources, while keeping Microsoft Copilot as an optional button rather than forcing AI summaries to the top of results. The article says AI search engines like Google's AI Mode can hide sources and produce misleading information, citing a ChatGPT example, and notes that Google's AI results can be partly avoided with tricks like adding "-ai" or "udm=14" to a query or switching Chrome's default search engine to Bing.

Microsoft Patent Tips Using Idle Gaming PCs to Train AI in Exchange for Rewards

Microsoft Technology Licensing filed a 2025 patent, published last week as US-20260349820-A1 and titled "Opportunistic Micro-training on Edge Devices Using Spare GPU Utilization," describing an opt-in system that uses idle GPU cycles on gaming PCs for AI training, similar to Folding@Home. The system would monitor memory, CPU, GPU, temperature and power draw to find cool idle periods, track completed work, and issue credits redeemable for use of the resulting AI model, free software or cash, with manual start/stop and usage limits.

From AI ambition to business impact

A Microsoft blog post, dated November 12, 2026, titled "From AI ambition to business impact," discusses moving AI efforts toward business results. The item was submitted to Hacker News, where it had 2 points and no comments.

The AI graveyard: a running list of projects and startups that didn’t make it

This roundup catalogs AI products, startups, and corporate initiatives that shut down, pivoted, or missed expectations, including Character.ai's bankruptcy filing, Ollie's shutdown, OpenAI's discontinued Atlas browser and Sora, and hardware failures like the Humane AI Pin. It cites S&P Global Market Intelligence's estimate that about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents, attributing failures to insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, scaling difficulty, or weak user demand.

The Missing Ring-0 Protections for AI Agents

This essay argues that coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex CLI and Gemini CLI act with the developer's authority while access checks sit in individual tools, so a write refused by the file tool can go through the shell, and it proposes a deterministic commit-boundary supervisor that stages file, git, network and credential effects before policy approval. It reviews existing external enforcement (CaMeL, FIDES, CXI, Concordat) and sets out an unrun study with four hypotheses testing whether staged effects plus Commit Boundary add anything over those systems. Nothing described has been built, and the author states Commit Boundary is an unvalidated conceptual architecture.

What could possibly go wrong? Nationwide FAA Ground Stop edition

The author, writing from EWR after spending most of the last 36 hours there, recounts earlier warnings about generative AI and LLMs, including a 2022 post and a September piece, and notes this week's large Microsoft outage. They say it is unclear whether the outage is the malicious cyberattack they warned about in Politico in January 2025 or the LLM failures they warned about in May 2022, and attribute the situation to Silicon Valley arrogance and Washington ineffectiveness.

Production MLOps at GS Caltex with Amazon SageMaker Canvas, part 1

GS Caltex connects models built by process engineers in Amazon SageMaker Canvas to production workflows in Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, with ML engineers handling deployment and scheduled inference. The company automated the handoff so ML engineers now deploy models within a few hours instead of about a week, and it runs batch inference every 30 minutes, which it reports has meaningfully lowered inference costs. The post details the reference architecture, including reusing Data Wrangler preprocessing flows, registering and approving models in Model Registry, and scheduling runs with Amazon EventBridge.

Cost attribution and controls for AI developer and productivity tools on Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock records the IAM principal behind every inference call and publishes it to CUR 2.0 and Cost Explorer, so per-user and per-team spend can be queried without instrumenting individual tools. The post walks through configuring IAM Identity Center with an external IdP, session tags, a Bedrock permission set, tool configuration for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex and ChatGPT Work, and Athena queries, then compares usage controls from AWS Budgets to gateway-level enforcement.

How Microsoft's Principal Software Engineering Manager Works and Uses AI

This newsletter case study profiles Tarik Guney, a Principal Software Engineering Manager on Microsoft Teams, describing his systems-thinking approach to finding bottlenecks through leading and lagging indicators and his focus on culture, goals, and tooling to multiply his team. Guney uses AI as a practical layer on existing workflows for code generation, faster information access, meeting summaries, tailored communications, context reconstruction, drafting, solution exploration, and routine task automation, while stressing that AI does not replace judgment. He advises starting small, integrating AI into existing workflows, focusing on outcomes rather than tools, and using AI where it meaningfully improves how teams work together.

Microsoft Research Focus – Edition #98

This edition of Microsoft Research Focus covers AI-powered universal translation, the resolution of the 31-year-old KLS conjecture in high-dimensional geometry, and a new approach to making AI coding agents faster and more efficient. It also highlights a research intern's journey at Microsoft Research Asia – Tokyo and the Latent Core Tokenizer, which produces more linguistically meaningful tokens across 104 languages.

Nebius tests the neocloud playbook with $40 billion in planned spending

Nebius outlined $40 billion in planned 2027 spending on its Q3 earnings call, funded largely through customer prepayments and contract-backed loans. Its Microsoft contract, worth up to $19.4 billion, is already slipping, with only just over half of the New Jersey capacity planned for delivery by year-end and the rest in Q2 2027, after operator DataOne wound down temporary generation faster than expected. Nebius cut its 2026 revenue forecast by $200 million to $3 billion and shares fell 17%.

Tokenomics at scale: Track and cap Amazon Bedrock spend per IAM principal with CUR 2.0 and AWS Budgets

This AWS post describes how to get per-identity Amazon Bedrock cost visibility and enforceable spend limits using only AWS-native features: IAM principal and session tags for attribution, Cost Explorer or CUR 2.0 exports (with the caller identity option) for reporting, and AWS Budgets with budget actions that attach a Deny IAM policy when a threshold is crossed. It notes that budget data refreshes up to three times a day, cost allocation tags are not retroactive, and a Deny action on a shared role blocks everyone using it.

US companies are seeking fewer foreign developers, and more "AI engineers"

Department of Labor LCA data show software-developer H-1B filings fell 36% from fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2026 (October–June comparisons), with new-hire filings down 46%, while filings carrying AI job titles reached 1.8% of all certified H-1B filings in fiscal 2026. AI-titled filings rose 80% for titles spelling out "machine learning" or "artificial intelligence," and shorter titles such as "AI engineer" supplied 92% of the latest year's increase, with employers outside the five largest accounting for 85% of AI-titled filings. Microsoft's software filings fell 44% and Google's 33%, while Nvidia's nearly quadrupled and Amazon's rose 34%.

ElevenLabs Scribe v3 Live uses conversational context to stop voice agents from cutting off callers mid-sentence

ElevenLabs released Scribe v3 for pre-recorded audio and Scribe v3 Live for low-latency real-time use, both available through the ElevenAPI and ElevenAgents platform. The company says Scribe v3 cuts word errors by about 25 percent versus its predecessor across 102 languages, while Artificial Analysis benchmarks confirm top-tier accuracy but note slower speed and mid-pack pricing. Scribe v3 Live analyzes conversational context alongside the audio signal to detect when a speaker has actually finished, and both models support preloaded specialized terms, natural-language formatting rules, and mid-sentence language switching.

Type 0.73: Earth on the Kardashev scale, and why AI is short of wire

An essay applies Kardashev's power-based ranking of civilizations to Earth, which rates about Type 0.73 on Sagan's decimal version, and examines the energy demands of AI data centres. It argues that the current constraint is not generation but grid connections, transmission lines and chipmaking concentrated in Taiwan and the Netherlands, and it weighs Jevons's claim that efficiency raises rather than lowers total consumption.

Lazare, veni foras: Reprogramming Dormant Neurons to Backdoor AI Agents

Microsoft researchers describe "Lazarus," a backdoor technique that reprograms fewer than 10 dormant neurons in an LLM, without training, so an agent built on it behaves normally and passes standard evals until a trigger—such as a date change—causes it to download and run attacker code with whatever access it has. The attack needs only write access to a checkpoint, so internally developed models are equally exposed, and reliable detection requires diffing against original weights, making provenance and weight integrity critical. Microsoft Foundry ties open-weight models to their publishers and scans surrounding containers, and Microsoft is developing AI-powered weight scanning, a red-teaming harness, and cryptographic model signing.

How TCS built an agentic test orchestrator with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

TCS built a multi-tenant Agentic Test Orchestrator on AWS that turns Jira stories, BRDs, Swagger specs, and GitLab sources into test scenarios, Gherkin files, and executable Java or Python tests, using specialized agents hosted on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime with the Strands Agents SDK. The platform separates a shared control plane from per-tenant application planes with isolated Cognito user pools, KMS keys, S3 buckets, and DynamoDB tables, and routes API tests to Amazon ECS on Fargate and Selenium UI tests to an EC2-backed ECS cluster. TCS reports that in an internal benchmark of about 100 scenarios, average effort fell from roughly two hours to about 14 minutes per scenario, an 88 percent reduction.

Show HN: Estimate the carbon footprint of your company's AI use (open data)

SOMA AI released a free calculator that estimates the CO₂e, electricity and water behind an organisation's use of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot and AI APIs, broken down by team and tool with a range. It uses SOMA AI's published inference factors (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23371447, method in peer review), based on ML.ENERGY Leaderboard v3 energy per token on H100 GPUs, a PUE of 1.2 and regional grid carbon intensity from Ember 2023 and US EPA eGRID 2023. A first estimate needs only tools, people and usage frequency (Tier 2b), with message counts or token data replacing defaults, and results are reported as Scope 3 Category 1 location-based.

Anthropic sets IPO price range of $70 to $78 per share to reach an implied valuation of $1.404 trillion

Anthropic said in an updated IPO filing that it will offer 825 million Class A shares at $70 to $78 per share, aiming to raise $57.75 billion to $64.35 billion and reach an implied valuation of $1.404 trillion at the top of the range on a fully diluted basis. The company also agreed to privately sell $26 billion of non-voting Class N stock at the IPO price to AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC, with Google and Nvidia investing $10 billion each, and expects to begin trading on the Nasdaq around November 19 under the ticker "ANT". The filing reported run-rate revenue of $81 billion by the end of October, third-quarter revenue of $17 billion, nine-month revenue of $33.2 billion and a nine-month net loss of $104 billion.

Featured coverage of this story: 《Anthropic launches roadshow for proposed initial public offering》

Eight countries and top AI labs agree to shutdown mechanisms in new Paris declaration

Representatives of eight countries, tech companies and civil-society organizations signed the "Paris Call for AI Safety and Security" on Nov. 9, ahead of the Paris Peace Forum, with Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Brad Smith, Arthur Mensch, Yoshua Bengio and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joining the declaration during an online meeting with Emmanuel Macron; Germany did not sign. The document covers shared procedures for evaluating high-capability AI models, clearer developer accountability and better information sharing on serious security incidents, and companies pledge to disclose known risks, support risk-proportionate independent audits and set up shutdown mechanisms for models under their control. It creates no binding international oversight system, deadlines or sanctions, since shared standards and cooperation procedures still have to be worked out.

Anthropic kicks off IPO roadshow, offering shares at $70 to $78 and targeting a trillion-dollar valuation

Anthropic is pitching investors on an IPO of 825 million Class A shares priced at $70 to $78, targeting a valuation of up to $1.02 trillion, with the offering plus a $26 billion private placement potentially raising up to $90.4 billion. The company reported Q3 revenue of $16.96 billion, up 47 percent quarter over quarter, alongside a commitment to nearly $900 billion in compute capacity with partners including Amazon and Google. The stock will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT," with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the underwriting syndicate.

Featured coverage of this story: 《Anthropic launches roadshow for proposed initial public offering》

Microsoft patent describes using idle gaming GPUs into paid AI training hardware

A VideoCardz report discusses a Microsoft patent describing the use of idle gaming GPU capacity for paid AI training. The item links to the VideoCardz article and a Hacker News discussion thread.

Protesters slam AI after entering Microsoft data centre site

Protesters broke into a Microsoft data centre site in Amsterdam on Friday (6 November), hanging anti-AI banners and spray-painting graffiti during a demonstration against the facility on the outskirts of the Dutch capital. More than 100 activists gathered at the site and eventually entered it, with protester Sam van der Beek saying demonstrators opposed "this whole AI infrastructure" and that data centres are "destroying our world." The protest kicked off two days of rallies against energy used for AI buildouts, with other planned actions including a march in Dublin, a protest outside the parliament building in Warsaw, and a demonstration against a different Microsoft data centre in Denmark.

Professional work deserves professional tools. Meet AWS Quick.

AWS announced its first brand campaign for AWS Quick, an AI workspace built only for work where teams use AI agents to research, analyze, and act across the data and applications they already rely on. The campaign runs in the United States and the United Kingdom on streaming TV, online video, social media, and leading business publications, and cites enterprises including 3M, BMW, Mondelez, New York Life, and Southwest Airlines as users. AWS says Quick has no consumer version and integrates with security and compliance tools such as Microsoft Purview, AWS IAM, and Microsoft Active Directory, and carries certifications including HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 2, and ISO 27001.

How CrossnoKaye grounds physical AI with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

CrossnoKaye's ATLAS software-defined automation platform and its AURA agentic system run on AWS, using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore code interpreter microVMs to execute model-authored Python for verifiable statistics and physical balances across plant data. AURA operates in three modes—interactive Chats with warm sandbox sessions, repeatable Tasks, and automated Routines—and enforces layered safety through Bedrock Guardrails, read-only air-gapped sandboxes, deterministic edge base control, and independent hardware protection. The post describes the architecture and reports results such as investigations completing in under four minutes and a 34 percent reduction in batch drying-time standard deviation.

Do AI coding agents care about SemVer or is it something for humans only?

Microsoft ran two Vally experiments with GitHub Copilot CLI (nearly 1,000 runs) and found that some models, notably Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5, checked upgrades less often when the version label was a patch than when it was a major release, even with byte-identical code. Three models (Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6.1 Terra) checked every update regardless of label, and all four merges that left main broken came with a patch or minor label. The author recommends keeping SemVer honest, enforcing CI on every dependency branch, and treating the version number as a hidden variable when evaluating agents.

Microsoft Workers Call for Accountable AI

A link submission to Hacker News, titled "Microsoft Workers Call for Accountable AI," points to an article on dash.palform.app. The submission has 4 points and 2 comments; the supplied material contains no further details of the article's content.

AI Live Speech Rewriting Patent

Microsoft has filed a patent application (US 2026/0341309 A1) for a system that uses AI to identify and replace words in live speech based on a user profile, then redraws the speaker's mouth in the video so the lips match, with short blended transitions hiding the seams. The same setup could act as a translator, swapping words in languages missing from the profile and redrawing lips to match, with a delay of a few seconds. The filing names AR glasses, phones, tablets and video cameras as possible devices, and notes the examiner's first review rejected the claims as filed.

Microsoft Researcher John Langford Exits. AI Frontiers Group Declared Finished

According to Business Examiner, Microsoft researcher John Langford has exited the company, and the AI Frontiers group has been declared finished. The item links to a Hacker News discussion with 75 points and 18 comments.

APM – A dependency manager for AI agents

APM is a dependency manager for AI agents that lets projects declare skills, prompts, instructions, plugins, and MCP servers in one apm.yml, then run apm install to deploy each primitive to supported harnesses including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini, Windsurf, and Kiro. It uses a lockfile to pin exact versions and content hashes, scans installs for hidden Unicode, and enforces apm-policy.yml at install time including transitive MCP servers. APM is open source under the microsoft org, MIT-licensed, and built on AGENTS.md, Agent Skills, and MCP.

The AI Business Model Just Collapsed

The author recounts past warnings about AI-related stocks and a public backlash, citing declines in Meta, Oracle and CoreWeave shares and saying 40 of 41 data center initiatives on a ballot went against AI. He argues tech companies should adopt transparency, opt-in choice, legality, environmental respect and safety, and lists requests to Spotify, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, social media CEOs and cultural institutions. He states he is not offering investment advice and frames his focus as society and human flourishing.

Microsoft Winding Down Oracle Deal to Rent AI Cloud Capacity

Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is winding down its deal with Oracle to rent AI cloud capacity. The article is available at the linked Bloomberg URL, with discussion on Hacker News.

Protesters break into Microsoft AI data centre site in Amsterdam

More than 100 activists broke into a Microsoft data centre construction site in Amsterdam, climbing cranes and hanging anti-AI banners. The action marks the start of two days of coordinated protests across 16 countries against the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure.

The End of AI Frontiers

A former Microsoft researcher recounts organizing the AI Frontiers group within Microsoft Research after ChatGPT's release to pursue coherent, agent-focused and fundamental research efforts, and describes its September reorg into Microsoft AI, whose scaling-only philosophy he found incompatible. He states that AI Frontiers is over, that there will be no internships with the group in the coming year, and explains why he did not return to MSR.

Microsoft plans to use fewer neoclouds as AI buildout shows signs of strain

Microsoft is evaluating which neocloud partners to stop using as it prioritizes its own data centers, according to people familiar with the matter, and it opted not to renew a deal with Oracle. The company has worked with CoreWeave, Nebius, Chronoscale, IREN, Lambda and Nscale, and has already scaled back work with Nscale, including a site in England and a Texas contract. Neocloud shares have fallen sharply amid rising borrowing costs and debt concerns, and Microsoft reported $45.2 billion in capital expenditures and finance leases in its latest quarter.

Microsoft is winding down Oracle deal to rent AI cloud capacity

Reuters reports, citing Bloomberg News, that Microsoft is winding down a deal to rent AI cloud capacity from Oracle. The article link and Hacker News discussion link are provided; no further details are given in the supplied material.

Protesters break into Microsoft data center site in Amsterdam

Protesters broke into a Microsoft data center construction site in Amsterdam, where around 100 people entered and some scaled a crane to hang a "fuck AI" banner, according to Reuters. The Geef Tegensag group helped organize the protest against three 85-meter data center towers, with banners including "Microsoft powers genocide" and chants of "Microsoft has got to go" and "free Palestine." The site, built by British developer Pure Data Centres with Microsoft as sole tenant, is proceeding under plans dating to 2016, before Amsterdam banned new data centers until 2030.

Formally verifying agent-written full-stack web apps with PDD Kit

GitHub Next describes PDD Kit, a toolkit for Proof-Driven Development that turns a developer's intent into a formal specification in Verus, proves the agent's code meets that spec for every input, and falls back to tests where proofs cannot reach. The team applied it to Pet Store, a roughly 5,000-line Rust full-stack app, formally verifying its login logic while the developer reviewed the intent rather than reading generated code line by line. PDD Kit labels each result as either formal verification or empirical evidence and asks developers to sign off on each trusted component.

AI stock selloffs fuel fears Big Tech's best quarters are over

A selloff in major technology stocks this week, with the Nasdaq 100 falling about 4% and wiping out more than $1 trillion in value, reflected investor fears that massive AI spending won't pay off soon. Quarterly results from Amazon, Alphabet, ServiceNow and Meta disappointed, while Intel shares plunged more than 30% after a weak outlook tied partly to an October factory explosion in Israel. Analysts said investors are trimming tech gains rather than exiting equities, though some remain optimistic about the sector's long-term prospects.

Big Tech’s big AI buildout will not end until someone stops it

Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta told investors they plan to spend at least $720 billion on capital expenditures this year, mostly on AI infrastructure, on top of at least $1 trillion in commitments for coming years, even though they have not yet made money from AI. Alphabet posted its worst one-day stock drop, sinking 13%, after acknowledging that Google Cloud's AI-driven growth came at the expense of its core Search business, where ad revenue growth slowed to 12% from 17% a year earlier. Microsoft was the only one of the four to avoid Wall Street's ire, reporting $45.2 billion in quarterly capex, below the expected $50 billion, due to third-party capacity delays, and it later announced a $25 billion bond sale.