microsoft
Microsoft, Apate, and the Race to Steal Each Other’s Playbook
More than a billion scam messages passed through a single marketplace called YAM Store before Microsoft and Japan’s National Police Agency shut it down this week. The same week, a startup named Apate took the opposite approach: it built AI agents whose only job is to get scammed on purpose, then report back on exactly…
Microsoft’s $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box and the Real Price of AI’s Productivity Dividend
Microsoft opened preorders this week for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a developer desktop built on Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell architecture, for $5,999, before a single buyer has run a model on one. That price sits oddly next to the promise everyone keeps repeating about artificial intelligence: that it hands an ordinary worker a leap…
SoftBank’s Bond-Funded Bet Splits the Work of Building AI
A bond issuance priced at $11.1 billion moved SoftBank’s stock more than 7 percent this week, funding a position in OpenAI that still has no earnings behind it. In other words, a company took on new debt, more leverage against a bet with no revenue yet to show for it, and the market rewarded it.…
The List Nobody Wants To Make
On October 7, Microsoft will hold a Windows and Surface event, its first dedicated hardware showcase in a while. The headlines will be about screens, hinges, and chip specs. The actual story is quieter: Windows stopped being the product years ago. It is the doorway. Every new Surface exists to keep you inside a subscription…
Everyone Is Quietly Buying the Floor They Stand On
Microsoft spent the better part of two years renting its intelligence. The partnership with OpenAI gave it a head start nobody else had, a frontier model wired into its products before the competition finished its slide decks. This week it unveiled its own family of models to lessen that reliance and lower costs, and the…
The Real Bottleneck Is Never the Thing You Think It Is
Alphabet is studying the possibility of putting data centers in orbit. That sentence sounds like a pitch meeting for a science fiction film. It is not. It is a real estate problem wearing a spacesuit, and it is the clearest evidence yet of the argument worth making about this entire buildout: the constraint on artificial…
Everyone Wants the Layer Below
Apple has begun applying an old App Store rule to a new species of software: the thin client wrapped around a frontier model, the “wrapper” in the dismissive shorthand the industry has adopted. The rule itself is unremarkable. The application of it is the news, because it forces a question nobody in this business has…