Microsoft

Microsoft quietly announced last week that its Israel general manager, Alon Haimovich, is stepping down at the end of the month after four years. Israeli newspaper Globes now reports that Haimovich is leaving amid a Microsoft investigation into Microsoft Israel’s work with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Microsoft blocked the Israeli military from some cloud and AI services last year after The Guardian revealed its services were being used for mass surveillance of Palestinians.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was just asked to explain what Copilot is during the Musk v. Altman trial. “Copilot is an AI assistant, similar to ChatGPT.” That’s funny because you won’t find a mention of ChatGPT in Microsoft’s Copilot marketing materials.

The Microsoft CEO said that though things “started off as, essentially, a bunch of people leaving,” it turned into them “talking about creating a new company. That was obviously very concerning to me.” He said he was trying to make sure Altman and Greg Brockman joined Microsoft instead of launching a new competitor: “I just wanted to make sure we could hang onto the band that created all this technology, one way or the other.”

Microsoft is holding an Xbox game dev update today, and a lot of gaming publications think that “a closer look at Project Helix” means it’s some kind of showcase. That’s not the case, as it’s just “a recap of our announcements from GDC,” according to Xbox’s Jason Ronald. “We will have more to share about Project Helix later this year.” You can follow along at 12PM ET / 9AM PT over at the Microsoft game dev YouTube channel, if you’re interested in Xbox game development.

The two companies’ famed 2019 contract was made public as part of the Musk v. Altman trial exhibits. The 36-page agreement defines artificial general intelligence as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”

The day after opening up its relationship with Microsoft and Azure, OpenAI announced an expanded deal with Amazon that brings its latest AI models, Codex, and other tools to AWS.

According to Microsoft’s lawyer Russell Cohen, making his opening argument in Musk v. Altman, saying that each round of funding (including across the events of November 2023) provided more resources, which produced better research and better models that justified further investment.

Following the opening argument by Altman’s lawyer, Russell Cohen began Microsoft’s argument. According to Cohen, the dispute has little to do with Microsoft (which just relaxed its arrangement with OpenAI).

GitHub uses a queue for developers when lots of people are working on a single project. It’s designed to avoid changes clashing and developers breaking things, but yesterday it failed in a catastrophic way thanks to a bug that randomly reverted previously merged commits (code snapshots). GitHub also had other outages yesterday, on the same day I reported on employee concerns about GitHub reliability and leadership.

Microsoft has scrapped Microsoft Gaming in favor of Xbox today, and it’s also starting to roll out a new Xbox logo. The new logo started appearing on Microsoft’s campus this week, just in time for Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s all-hands meeting earlier today. The new Xbox logo has a more glassy look, and I understand Microsoft has also been using this new design for some of its internal Project Helix materials.