Microsoft has appointed the co-founder of the British artificial intelligence lab DeepMind as the head of a new AI division. Mustafa Suleyman, 39, co-founded DeepMind with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg in 2010 and the company went on to be bought by Google for 400m in 2014. It now forms the core of Google's AI efforts after merging with another unit to become Google DeepMind in 2023. The chief executive of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, announced in a blogpost that the British AI pioneer, who left DeepMind in 2019, will be chief executive of a new organisation called Microsoft AI focusing on the US company's consumer products and research. Several employees at Sulyeman's Inflection AI startup will join the division.

Using artificial intelligence to create artworks increases artists' productivity and generates more positive reactions, according to a study involving submissions to a popular art-sharing website by more than 50,000 users. However, generative AI works are more likely to display stereotypical themes and depictions, reducing the novelty of the artist's work. How this moment for AI will change society forever (and how it won't)

Microsoft has named Mustafa Suleyman head of its consumer artificial intelligence business, hiring most of the staff from his Inflection AI startup as the software giant seeks to fend off Alphabet's Google in the fiercely contested market for AI products. Suleyman, who co-founded Google's DeepMind, will report to CEO Satya Nadella and oversee a range of projects, such as integrating an AI Copilot into Windows and adding conversational elements to the Bing search engine. His hiring will put Microsoft's consumer AI work under one leader for the first time. Inflection has been a rival of Microsoft's key AI partner OpenAI. The company is shifting to selling AI software to businesses but will continue operating its Pi consumer chatbot business for now.

At the screenings of Ryan Gosling's new movie "The Fall Guy" and Sydney Sweeney's "Immaculate" -- headlining events of the first week of this year's South by Southwest (SXSW) conference -- a reel of speakers touting the merits of AI including Peter Deng, head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, was loudly booed by audiences. In other halls of the annual Austin confab, which attracts over 300,000 people each year, the tone was one of heady optimism. Companies were spinning a positive narrative -- pushing the idea that AI wouldn't destroy jobs, but rather represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize a multitude of industries. International Business Machines Chief Human Resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux told a SXSW panel that AI will instead alleviate labor shortages that are set to worsen as birth rates decline across developed economies. And while only a tiny percentage of jobs can be completely automated, the vast majority won't disappear -- but will change dramatically.

Today's video-conferencing tools support a rich range of professional and social activities, but their generic, grid-based environments cannot be easily adapted to meet the varying needs of distributed collaborators. To enable end-user customization, we developed BlendScape, a system for meeting participants to compose video-conferencing environments tailored to their collaboration context by leveraging AI image generation techniques. BlendScape supports flexible representations of task spaces by blending users' physical or virtual backgrounds into unified environments and implements multimodal interaction techniques to steer the generation. Through an evaluation with 15 end-users, we investigated their customization preferences for work and social scenarios. Participants could rapidly express their design intentions with BlendScape and envisioned using the system to structure collaboration in future meetings, but experienced challenges with preventing distracting elements. We implement scenarios to demonstrate BlendScape's expressiveness in supporting distributed collaboration techniques from prior work and propose composition techniques to improve the quality of environments.

While the tech industry went gaga for generative artificial intelligence, one giant has held back: Apple. The company has yet to introduce so much as an AI-generated emoji, and according to a New York Times report today and earlier reporting from Bloomberg, it is in preliminary talks with Google about adding the search company's Gemini AI model to iPhones. Yet a research paper quietly posted online last Friday by Apple engineers suggests that the company is making significant new investments into AI that are already bearing fruit. It details the development of a new generative AI model called MM1 capable of working with text and images. The researchers show it answering questions about photos and displaying the kind of general knowledge skills shown by chatbots like ChatGPT.

Microsoft now has a lone leader overseeing consumer AI for the first time. Suleyman will try to push the consumer-facing Copilot assistant into the future, preparing for what may be a long battle with Google for artificial intelligence supremacy among Silicon Valley's Big Five companies. Suleyman's official title will be executive vice president and CEO of a new division called Microsoft AI, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Joining him will be fellow Inflection AI cofounder Karén Simonyan, who takes the title of chief scientist. "Messy" could be one way to describe Microsoft's Copilot rollout.

I have spent most of my career working on computer science (CS) education whether teaching undergraduate CS or managing technical education for software engineers at Google. In the early 1990s, when Pascal was the language of choice, I began teaching CS1 and CS2 at Stanford. Over the next few years, I saw the transition from Pascal to C to object-oriented programming. I also saw the pace at which we had to consistently update our course materials and projects, whether it was in the introductory courses or later electives such as graphics or compilers. Languages, software frameworks, libraries, APIs, and so forth change rapidly.

Nvidia has unveiled its latest family of chips for powering artificial intelligence as it seeks to consolidate its position as the major supplier to the AI frenzy. So, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to a very, very big GPU," CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday at a developers conference in California, referring to the graphics processors that are vital in the creation of generative AI. The event, dubbed the "AI Woodstock" by Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, has become a can't-miss date on big tech's calendar due to Nvidia's singular role in the AI revolution that has taken the world by storm since the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022. "I hope you realise this is not a concert, this is a developers' conference," Huang joked as he took the stage in a packed arena usually reserved for ice hockey games and concerts. Nvidia's powerful GPU chips and software are an integral ingredient in the creation of generative AI, with rivals like AMD or Intel still struggling to match the power and efficiency of the company's blockbuster H100 product, launched in 2022.

In less than two years, NVIDIA's H100 chips, which are used by nearly every AI company in the world to train large language models that power services like ChatGPT, made it one of the world's most valuable companies. On Monday, NVIDIA announced a next-generation platform called Blackwell, whose chips are between seven and 30 times faster than the H100 and use 25 times less power. "Blackwell GPUs are the engine to power this new Industrial Revolution," said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the company's annual GTC event in San Jose attended by thousands of developers, and which some compared to a Taylor Swift concert. "Generative AI is the defining technology of our time. Working with the most dynamic companies in the world, we will realize the promise of AI for every industry," Huang added in a press release.