Entries tagged microsoft
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Saying “hi” to Microsoft’s Phi-4-reasoning
Microsoft released a new sub-family of models a few days ago: Phi-4 reasoning. They introduced them in this blog post celebrating a year since the release of Phi-3:
[... 1,498 words]Notes from Bing Chat—Our First Encounter With Manipulative AI
I participated in an Ars Live conversation with Benj Edwards of Ars Technica today, talking about that wild period of LLM history last year when Microsoft launched Bing Chat and it instantly started misbehaving, gaslighting and defaming people.
[... 438 words]Running Llama 3.2 Vision and Phi-3.5 Vision on a Mac with mistral.rs
mistral.rs is an LLM inference library written in Rust by Eric Buehler. Today I figured out how to use it to run the Llama 3.2 Vision and Phi-3.5 Vision models on my Mac.
[... 1,231 words]Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do all of the other fun things that engines like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have been demonstrating over the past few months: the ability to generate poetry, and jokes, and do creative writing, and so much more.
[... 4,922 words]Work process vs technology
Do you have a plan for what happens if you lose your hard drive, or someone steals it? I understand your need for offline access, but personally I’m terrified of losing my laptop to the point that I use cloud backup services (Dropbox, but I’ve used and liked Backblaze in the past) to make absolutely sure that I don’t lose any data should my laptop get lost or stolen.
[... 81 words]What is the real risk of pirating Microsoft software as a startup business vs an individual user?
I agree with David S. Rose—integrity matters. Look in to BizSpark.
[... 108 words]Is Microsoft’s platform prohibitively expensive for large scale web deployment? Would licensing costs have killed Twitter/Facebook early?
I would argue that the cost of the Microsoft stack is a lot more than just the license fees.
[... 546 words]The point of “Open” in OpenID
TechCrunch report that Microsoft are accepting OpenID for their new HealthVault site, but with a catch: you can only use OpenIDs from two providers: Trustbearer (who offer two-factor authentication using a hardware token) and Verisign. "Whatever happened to the Open in OpenID?", asks TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid.
[... 451 words]Questioning Steve Ballmer
This morning I attended a half day briefing at Microsoft UK entitled “The Online Opportunity—What Makes a Successful Web 2.0 Start-Up?”. Despite the buzzword laden title the event was well worth the trip up from Brighton, mainly due to the Q&A with Steve Ballmer (a pretty rare opportunity).
[... 423 words]Nasty new IE vulnerability
Most people reading are probably aware of the common trick whereby spammers and other assorted ne’er-do-wells publish URLs with usernames that look like hostnames to fool people in to trusting a malicious site—for example, http://www.microsoft.com&session%123123123@simon.incutio.com. This trick is frequently used by spammers to steal people’s PayPal accounts, by tricking them in to “resetting” their password at a site owned by the spammer but disguised as PayPal.com.
[... 164 words]Palladium
Via Boing Boing: Seth Schoen’s notes on Palladium after a meeting with Microsoft. Cory Doctorow points out that Seth is probably the most knowledgeable tech person to have been briefed on Palladium by MSFT without signing an NDA
and his post certainly makes interesting reading. Palladium has had a lot of coverage since the Newsweek article announcing it first broke, with Robert Cringely providing some of the best analysis (in my opinion at least). The Register also has a story about Palladium which introduces some more information and guestimates on a shipping schedule.