Tea

In 2025, we find that the student use of AI has surged in the last year, with almost all students (92%) now using AI in some form, up from 66% in 2024, and some 88% having used GenAI for assessments, up from 53% in 2024. The main uses of GenAI are explaining concepts, summarising articles and suggesting research ideas, but a significant number of students – 18% – have included AI-generated text directly in their work.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella presented new products at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, a group of employees positioned themselves about 15 feet to his right. They then unveiled T-shirts which spelled out the question: “Does Our Code Kill Kids, Satya?”

Photos and videos of the protest, which was live-streamed across Microsoft, show CEO Satya Nadella continuing his speech without acknowledging the demonstrators. Two men quickly approached the protesting employees and escorted them out of the room.

Microsoft defended its actions in a statement, saying: “We provide many avenues for all voices to be heard. Importantly, we ask that this be done in a way that does not cause a business disruption. If that happens, we ask participants to relocate. We are committed to ensuring our business practices uphold the highest standards.”

In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.

Edit: I changed the link to the official source.

Governments frequently disagree over the names of places. Here’s how mapping apps have dealt with various feuds.

Mozilla has just deleted the following:

“Does Firefox sell your personal data?”

“Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. "

Source: Lundke journal.

We’re releasing a research preview of GPT‑4.5—our largest and best model for chat yet. GPT‑4.5 is a step forward in scaling up pre-training and post-training. By scaling unsupervised learning, GPT‑4.5 improves its ability to recognize patterns, draw connections, and generate creative insights without reasoning.

Today we’re launching Octave (Omni-capable text and voice engine), the first LLM for text-to-speech. Unlike conventional TTS that merely “reads” words, Octave is a speech-language model that understands what words mean in context, unlocking a new level of expressiveness and nuance—and new AI voice capabilities. It acts out characters, generates voices from prompts, and takes instructions to modify the emotion and style of a given utterance.

We are excited to announce Phi-4-multimodal and Phi-4-mini, the newest models in Microsoft’s Phi family of small language models (SLMs). These models are designed to empower developers with advanced AI capabilities. Phi-4-multimodal, with its ability to process speech, vision, and text simultaneously, opens new possibilities for creating innovative and context-aware applications. Phi-4-mini, on the other hand, excels in text-based tasks, providing high accuracy and scalability in a compact form. Now available in Azure AI Foundry, HuggingFace, and the NVIDIA API Catalog where developers can explore the full potential of Phi-4-multimodal on the NVIDIA API Catalog, enabling them to experiment and innovate with ease.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Ocelot, a new quantum computing chip that can reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90%, compared to current approaches. Developed by the team at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at the California Institute of Technology, Ocelot represents a breakthrough in the pursuit to build fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of solving problems of commercial and scientific importance that are beyond the reach of today’s conventional computers.

This is very interesting:

After pulling 250,000 mentions of 30 different search engines from 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” /pol/ board, we identified 1,218 comments that both mentioned at least three search engines and recommended one or more search engines. Comments meeting these criteria appeared an average of 15 times per month between January 2018 and July 2024. Figure 1 displays the monthly mentions of each search engine in the 1,218 /pol/ comments in this same time period. We have noted that spikes in comparisons occurred at the onset of the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and during the vaccine rollout in the spring of 2021. Much of the 2020 spike was driven by a thread titled “The Great Jewtube Exodus,” which was reposted 45 times between March 7 and March 23, 2020.7 In each reposting, the author encouraged others to use Yandex, Bing, Startpage, or Brave Search instead of Google. These threads repeatedly resulted in conversations about search engine quality in the comments.