The Financial Times reports that Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google DeepMind, has now hired multiple former colleagues to help run a new AI health unit at Microsoft. The former head of DeepMind’s health unit, Dominic King, has been hired as vice-president of Microsoft AI’s new London-based health team. Suleyman recently appeared on Decoder to discuss conversational AI.
The “Xbox 360 glitch holiday sweater” includes a power button that illuminates green, and there’s even an interchangeable module that produces the Red Ring of Death. Microsoft loves ugly sweaters, but this one is exclusive to Microsoft employees right now. I’ve heard this one went on sale at Microsoft’s company store today and it has already sold out.
Microsoft is facing its second Microsoft 365 outage in two weeks. This time web apps like Outlook and Teams are impacted, and Microsoft recommends using the desktop apps to access data and documents while it works on identifying the root cause. The last major Microsoft 365 outage on November 25th affected Exchange Online and Microsoft teams.
Google’s top trending searches for 2024 are out now and the top recipe is for Olympics chocolate muffins after Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen popularized the sweet treats. Other surprisingly popular searches include Baby Reindeer as the most searched for TV show and The New York Times’ Connections game beating Palworld and Helldivers 2 for the top gaming spot.
[Google Trends]
A corporation joining Bluesky isn’t normally news, but Microsoft managed to do it in style this week. The first thing you’ll probably notice is the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper and a pun about blue skies, but if you look a little closer you’ll see Microsoft even backdated this post to its founding date of April 4th, 1975 using Bluesky’s AT Protocol. That’s the kind of nerdery that Bluesky users appreciate.
Microsoft is stepping up its Copilot Plus PC marketing today with a new ad for the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World movie. The 60-second spot features Danny Ramirez’s Joaquin Torres (Falcon) using a Surface Laptop 7 with Paint’s Cocreator AI mode to generate images. Microsoft has been running similar TV ads in recent weeks, claiming that its Qualcomm-powered laptops are somehow “the fastest... Windows PCs ever.”
