Meta and Microsoft are trimming their workforces by thousands as they make heavy investments in AI and executives claim that the technology is meeting their companies' productivity needs. Meta told staff on Thursday that on 20 May it would cut some 10% of its personnel - just under 8,000 employees-to boost efficiency, part of a layoff plan made months ago . The company is also closing about 6,000 open roles. The same day, Microsoft announced to employees, for the first time, that it would offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of its American workforce of roughly 125,000. In an internal memo to Meta's staff, Janelle Gale, the chief people officer, didn't mention AI explicitly but said the cuts would allow the company to "offset the other investments we're making".

Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, speaks at the company's annual developer conference in Seattle, Washington. Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, speaks at the company's annual developer conference in Seattle, Washington. Tech giant reports earnings of $3.72 per share day after deal with OpenAI pushed value of company to more than $4tn Microsoft blew off concerns of overspending on AI on Wednesday, reporting elevated earnings even as it faced an outage of its cloud computing service, Azure, and its office software suite, 365. The strong earnings report comes a day after a deal with OpenAI pushed the value of the tech giant to more than $4tn. After its Xbox and investor relations pages went down, the company issued a statement that said: "We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services."

Microsoft says its new $30bn (£22bn) investment in the UK's AI sector - its largest outside of the US - should significantly boost Britain's economy in the next few years. Its package forms a major part of a £31billion agreement made between the UK government and various other US tech giants, including Nvidia and Google, to invest in British-based infrastructure to support AI technology, largely in the form of data centres. Microsoft will also now be involved in the creation of a powerful new supercomputer in Loughton, Essex. Speaking exclusively to the BBC Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the BBC of the tech's potential impact on economic growth. It may happen faster, so our hope is not ten years but maybe five.

Jaime Teevan joined Microsoft before it was cool again. In 2006, she was completing her doctorate in artificial intelligence at MIT. She had many options but was drawn to the company's respected, somewhat ivory-tower-ish research division. Teevan remained at Microsoft while the mother ship blundered its way through the mobile era. Then, as the calendar flipped into the 2010s, an earth-shattering tech advance emerged.

Microsoft has announced plans to invest 1.7bn in artificial intelligence and cloud services in Indonesia. Under the plans unveiled by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the tech giant will train 840,000 people in Indonesia in the use of AI and provide support for the country's growing ranks of tech developers. The announcement marks the biggest investment by Microsoft in its nearly three-decade history in the Southeast Asian country. Nadella on Tuesday held talks with President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, at Jakarta's presidential palace before delivering a keynote speech about AI in the Indonesian capital. "This new generation of AI is reshaping how people live and work everywhere, including in Indonesia," Nadella said on the first stop of a tour of Southeast Asia.

The co-founder of a leading US artificial intelligence firm is making a comeback to the company that terminated him as CEO last week, the latest twist in a week-long drama over its leadership. OpenAI, which owns the popular chatbot ChatGPT, announced late on Tuesday on the social media platform X that it had reached "an agreement in principle" to bring back tech entrepreneur Sam Altman as CEO. We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

It's been an eventful weekend at OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco. In a surprise move Friday, the company's board of directors fired co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, which set off an institutional crisis that has seen senior staff resign in protest with nearly 700 rank-and-file employees threatening to do the same. Now the board is facing calls for its own resignation, even after Microsoft had already swooped in to hire Altman's cohort away for its own AI projects. Here's everything you need to know about the situation to hold your own at Thanksgiving on Thursday. This saga began forever ago by internet standards, or last Thursday in the common parlance.

In another twist on the OpenAI saga that raged over the weekend, Microsoft has swooped in and hired Sam Altman and Greg Brockman just after OpenAI confirmed Altman won't be returning, CEO Satya Nadella announced in a post on X. The pair, along with colleagues are joining Microsoft "to lead a new advanced AI research team." Nadella added that Microsoft "remain[s] committed to our partnership with OpenAI," but the move looks a giant hedge on that bet. It also means the much of OpenAI's talent may be moving to Microsoft, which may stall progress on the widely-used ChatGPT product. We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners.

In another twist on the OpenAI saga that raged over the weekend, Microsoft has swooped in and hired Sam Altman and Greg Brockman just after OpenAI confirmed Altman won't be returning, CEO Satya Nadella announced in a post on X. The pair, along with colleagues are joining Microsoft "to lead a new advanced AI research team." Nadella added that Microsoft "remain[s] committed to our partnership with OpenAI," but the move looks a giant hedge on that bet. It also means the much of OpenAI's talent may be moving to Microsoft, which may stall progress on the widely-used ChatGPT product. We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners.

I never thought I'd write these words, but here goes. Satya Nadella--and Microsoft, the company he runs--are riding high on the buzz from its search engine. That's quite a contrast from the first time I spoke with Nadella, in 2009. Back then, he was not so well known, and he made a point of telling me about his origins. Born in Hyderabad, India, he attended grad school in the US and joined Microsoft in 1992, just as the firm was rising to power.