What makes the PC the superior platform for personal computing? Sometimes that choice can be daunting though. Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite just launched in Microsoft's debut Copilot_ laptops, coming out swinging against Intel's Core Ultra chip. With the launch of Ryzen AI 300-series today, you're now faced with a third choice. Fear not, as I've just finished testing performance testing of AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, its new flagship processor for Copilot laptops.

Microsoft plans to make OpenAI's generative AI technology such as ChatGPT available to billions of users by integrating it into all of its products, CEO Satya Nadella said this week. That means that ChatGPT's ability to generate text through short prompts is likely on its way to the Office 365 product suite, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Using OpenAI's models, Microsoft Word's autocomplete and autocorrect features could carry out more advanced tasks than style and grammar correction and generate longer chunks of text based on a few words. Though the company hasn't announced any specific features yet, users could potentially be able to input prompts and generate complete PowerPoint presentations and emails. These kinds of features could help Microsoft attract younger users. While Microsoft Office 365 has been a de facto standard for millions of enterprises, analysts say the tech giant has fallen behind in attracting those who gravitate toward collaborative-first products like Google Docs and Sheets.

AI is taking on an increasingly important role in many Microsoft products, such as Bing and Office 365. In some cases, it's being used to power outward-facing features like semantic search in Microsoft Word or intelligent answers in Bing, and deep neural networks (DNNs) are one key to powering these features. One aspect of DNNs is inference--once these networks are trained, they use inference to make judgments about unknown information based on prior learning. In Bing, for example, DNN inference enables multiple search scenarios including feature extraction, captioning, question answering, and ranking, which are all important tasks for customers to get accurate, fast responses to their search queries. These scenarios in Bing have stringent latency requirements and need to happen at an extremely large scale.

Cybersecurity teams have always had to adapt to new attack methods and change the tools they use to fit the organization's processes better. A prime example of adapting to fit ways of work is the increased preponderance of cloud-based business services and applications. If most of the company's work takes place on web-based SaaS platforms, perimeter-based cybersecurity protection loses importance, and CISOs start to look at cloud-based zero-trust frameworks, for example. Similarly, as more companies move their workflows to Google Suite or Office 365, the secure email gateway that protected the on-prem email server and clients gets mothballed in favor of ICES (integrated cloud email security) solutions. At the same time, agent-based endpoint protection that uses heuristic scanning or rule-based algorithms with pushed/pulled updates are proving more ineffective against very, very smart phishing attacks that exploit weaknesses in every device's "biological interface." User education in online hygiene may have a role in solving that problem, but even seasoned cybersecurity veterans reading these pages will know that they too have, in a moment of inattention, clicked the odd suspect link.

Artificial intelligence is defined as the ability of a computer to carry out tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term relates to a group of actions that can be performed by a machine which resemble human actions. Among these actions are reasoning, meaning-making, and even learning from repeated experience. Microsoft AI and its suite of products contained in Office 365 bear the hallmarks of an increasing range of AI capabilities. Now let's take a deeper dive into Office 365 AI (Artificial Intelligence).

Some hardworking Microsoft sleuths have been unearthing some new codenames and leads this weekend. Thanks to @h0x0d (The Walking Cat) and Tero Alhonen (@terhoalhonen) we have a bit of information about Microsoft's "MeTAOS" and "Taos." Microsoft already has a "productivity cloud" in place with its Microsoft 365/Office 365 set of offerings. Underpinning Office 365 is a layer called the "substrate," which is Microsoft's customer data platform. Microsoft is now endeavoring to build a large-scale distributed platform, or foundation, which will sit on top of SharePoint, the Office 365 substrate, Azure, Microsoft's machine-learning infrastructure and more.

Microsoft has revealed what it's thinking about for upcoming iterations of Microsoft 365 and its Office apps, combining a flexible ribbon and a more muted color scheme with adaptive commands and a greater emphasis on artificial intelligence. In a blog post on Tuesday, the chief designer of Office 365, Jon Friedman, said that some of the changes were on the table, while others were simply exploratory. Friedman didn't provide a timeline for the changes beyond a "year or two," but it's likely that this will be another wholesale update of the Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) suite. Microsoft has continually updated Office over time--and it's had to, as it's asking customers to spend about $70 per year just for a personal license to what's now called Microsoft 365. In 2018, the new innovation was Microsoft Search, the search box that lives at the top of apps like Outlook and SharePoint.

My passion for security came to the forefront when I ran the Security business at Juniper. Given this confluence of factors, the opportunity to apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) to dramatically innovate how we could detect and respond to advanced attacks (the new norm), created an incredible opportunity to build a next-generation security company. Which directly led to the creation of Vectra. Digital Transformation can become a task rife with complexities and it is no surprise that security risks become a byproduct of that. Effective Network Detection and Response (NDR) provides visibility that simplifies complexity, replacing it with the confidence that a customer's security capabilities will enable, not inhibit, their journey – legacy methods disproportionately focused on prevention are brittle and frankly designed in such a way that makes this journey needlessly costly and difficult.

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The main pillar of the plan is focused on accelerating Mexico's digital transformation through democratizing the access to technology. The company announced plans to establish a new cloud datacenter region in Mexico to deliver its intelligent and trusted cloud services to serve Mexico's public entities, organizations and Mexican society, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. This datacenter region is an important part of Microsoft's $1.1 billion investment plan in Mexico over the next five years. The plan also includes a robust education and skilling program with different initiatives the first one being the creation of three laboratories and a virtual classroom, in collaboration with public universities to create an education platform for digital skills, to expand employability in future generations. The first initiative of the commitment to apply artificial intelligence to create societal impact is an investment in the project "Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Pelagic Sharks in the Mexican Pacific Ocean" (Shark ID), focused on the conservation of Mako shark species, driven by Mexico Azul, as part of the initiative AI for Earth, creating societal impact.