Microsoft has quietly launched a new version of Microsoft Office for Windows that can be used to edit documents for free, no Microsoft 365 subscription or Office license key required. From a report: This free version of Office is based on the full desktop apps, but has most features locked behind the Microsoft 365 subscription. The free version of Office for Windows includes ads that are permanently on screen when within a document in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Additionally, this new free version of Office also only allows you to save files to OneDrive, meaning no support for editing local files. To access the free version of Office, just skip the prompt to sign-in when you first run an Office app. From there, you will be given the choice to continue to use Office for free in exchange for ads and limited features. In this mode, you can open, view, and even edit documents, just like you can with the web version of Office.

Major corporations are reshaping their workforces around AI with Salesforce announcing it will not hire software engineers in 2025 and other companies laying off thousands while shifting focus to AI-specific roles. Duolingo has laid off thousands after implementing ChatGPT-4, UPS cut 4,000 jobs in its largest layoff in 116 years, and IBM paused hiring for back-office and HR positions that AI can now handle.

Amazon is redirecting staff from Alexa to AI areas, while Intuit is laying off 10% of its non-AI workforce. Cisco plans to cut 7% of employees in its second round of job cuts this year as it prioritizes AI and cybersecurity. Salesforce reports its AI platform is boosting software engineering productivity by 30%. SAP is restructuring 8,000 positions to focus on AI-driven business areas. The trend extends globally, with Microsoft relocating thousands during an "exodus" from China, while entry-level jobs on Wall Street are becoming obsolete.

A study found that 3 out of 10 companies replaced workers with AI last year, with over one-third of firms using AI likely to automate more roles in 2025. Job listings at large privately-held AI companies have dropped 14.2% over six months, JP Morgan wrote in a note seen by Slashdot. The transformation is creating new opportunities, with rising demand for AI skills in job postings. A survey of more than 1,200 users found nearly two-thirds of young professionals use AI tools at work, with 93% not worried about job threats, as business leaders view Generation Z's digital skills as beneficial for leveraging AI.

Microsoft has canceled some leases for US data center capacity, according to TD Cowen, raising broader concerns over whether it's securing more AI computing capacity than it needs in the long term. From a report: OpenAI's biggest backer has voided leases in the US totaling "a couple of hundred megawatts" of capacity -- the equivalent of roughly two data centers -- canceling agreements with at least a couple of private operators, the US brokerage wrote Friday, citing "channel checks" or inquiries with supply chain providers. TD Cowen said its checks also suggest Microsoft has pulled back on converting so-called statements of qualifications, agreements that usually lead to formal leases.

Microsoft in a statement on Monday reiterated its spending target for the fiscal year ending June, but declined to comment on TD Cowen's note. Exactly why Microsoft may be pulling some leases is unclear. TD Cowen posited in a second report on Monday that OpenAI is shifting workloads from Microsoft to Oracle as part of a relatively new partnership. The tech giant is also among the largest owners and operators of data centers in its own right and is spending billions of dollars on its own capacity. TD Cowen separately suggested that Microsoft may be reallocating some of that in-house investment to the US from abroad.

After completing a journalism graduate degree, Carla McCanna took a job "training AI models to optimize accuracy and efficiency," according an article by Nieman Journalism Lab: Staff jobs are scarce... and the competition for them is daunting. (In 2024, the already beleaguered U.S. news industry cut nearly 5,000 jobs, up 59% from the previous year, according to an annual report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas....) For the past couple months, McCanna has been working close to full-time for [AI training data company] Outlier, picking up projects on its gig platform at about $35 per hour. Data work has quickly become her primary source of income and a hustle she's recommended [to her journalism program classmates]. "A lot of us are still looking for jobs. Three times I told someone what I do, and they're like, please send it to me," she said. "It's hard right now, and a lot of my colleagues are saying the same thing."

McCanna is just one of many journalists who has been courted by Outlier to take on part-time, remote data work over the past year... Several of them told me they have taken on Outlier projects to supplement their income or replace their work in journalism entirely, because of dwindling staff jobs or freelance assignments drying up. Some are early-career journalists like McCanna, but others are reporters with over a decade of experience. One thing they all had in common? Before last year they'd never heard of Outlier or even knew that this type of work existed.

Launched back in 2023, Outlier is a platform owned and managed by Scale AI, a San Francisco-based data annotation company valued at $13.8 billion. It counts among its customers the world's largest AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Outlier, and similar platforms like CrowdGen and Remotasks, use networks of remote human workers to improve the AI models of their clients. Workers are paid by the hour for tasks like labeling training data, drafting test prompts, and grading the factual accuracy and grammar of outputs. Often their work is fed back into an AI model to improve its performance, through a process called reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). This human feedback loop has been core to building models like OpenAI's GPT and Meta's Llama.

Aside from direct recruitment messages, I also found dozens of recent public job postings that underscore this growing trend of hiring journalists for data work... Rather than training a replacement, McCanna sees her data work as an asset, growing her knowledge of AI tools as they continue to embed in the workplace. "Actually doing this work you realize AI models still need us ... I think it's going to be a really, really long time until they can truly write like humans."

New power plants burning natural gas are being built all across America, reports the Washington Post, calling it a gas boom "driven in large part by AI."

They blame tech companies like Microsoft and Meta — which "looked to gas amid a shortage of adequate new clean energy" — while noting that those companies "say they plan to offset their development of natural gas capacity with equal investments in clean energy like solar and wind." [E]ven coal is making a comeback. But the biggest push is for gas, with more than 220 plants in various stages of development nationwide. They are often pitched as a bridge until more clean power is available, sometimes with promises the plants will eventually be equipped with nascent technology that traps greenhouse gas emissions. But the timeline for installing such "carbon capture" is vague. "These companies are building these massive new gas plants that are going to be there for 30 to 50 years," said Bill Weihl, a former director of sustainability at Facebook and founder of the nonprofit ClimateVoice. "That's not a bridge. It is a giant bomb in our carbon budget...."

Public filings from some of the big tech companies driving this development show their greenhouse gas emissions are soaring... "The last few years have revealed that a global energy transition is more complex and less linear than anticipated," Microsoft's board wrote in urging rejection of a December shareholder resolution demanding the company confront the climate risks of AI. "While urgency builds for decarbonization, so does the demand for energy."

Shareholders rejected the resolution. Microsoft is battling with environmental groups over its plans to build a multibillion-dollar data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, powered with electricity from natural gas. Their petition warns Microsoft's project "will push our state's climate goals out of reach, locking us into 30 more years of fossil fuels." The company said in a statement that it remains committed to erasing its emissions by adding substantial clean power to regional power grids. "By the end of 2025 we expect to meet our goal of adding new sources of carbon-free electricity to the grid equal to 100 percent of the electricity used by our datacenters," the statement said.

Meta says it is doing the same in Louisiana [where it's building a new 4-million-square-foot data center] and is "committed to matching our electricity use with 100 percent clean and renewable energy."
The article includes two revealing quotes:

• "It is like everyone just gave up," said Aaron Zubaty, CEO of Eolian, a large clean energy developer that works with data centers.

• American Petroleum Institute President Mike Sommers (who represents the oil and gas industry in Washington), said "The words that have replaced 'energy transition' are 'AI' and 'data centers'. We're transitioning from the energy transition to the energy reality ... We're going to need a lot more oil and gas."

Five days ago on Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released patch KB5051987 for Windows 11 version 24H2, writes the XDA Developers site.

But "As reported by Windows Latest and various communities like Reddit and Microsoft's help forum, many users have encountered a major issue..."

Some have reported that, in addition to File Explorer failing to launch, they're unable to open folders from the desktop, save Office files, or even download files. Clicking on a folder icon may display its subfolders, but the contents within remain inaccessible... Some users on Microsoft's help forum and Reddit have also reported that the KB5051987 patch fails to install entirely. The update gets stuck at a certain percentage for hours before eventually displaying an error code. While these are among the most widely reported issues, others have surfaced as well, including problems with Taskbar preview animations, the camera, and more.
"Microsoft keeps running into brick walls with the 2024 version of Windows 11," writes ZDNet. "Each new update designed to fix the outstanding bugs ends up introducing other problems..." Among the glitches resolved were ones that affected digital audio converters, USB audio drivers, USB cameras, and passkeys. The update also patched several security vulnerabilities, including some that were deemed critical....

Other glitches that may pop up include a stuttering mouse, an undetectable camera, .NET apps that cannot be installed inside the Windows Sandbox, and the Taskbar's new preview animation that does not work properly. You may also encounter other roadblocks. One person in the Windows Feedback Hub said that after installing the update, the battery life shows only 2.5 hours versus 6 hours previously. Another person found that the clipboard history no longer copies items from Microsoft Word...

Each annual Windows update can suffer from bugs, especially after being rolled out to millions of users. However, Windows 11 24H2 has been more problematic than usual. Since its official launch last October, the 2024 version has carried with it a host of known issues, many of which still haven't been resolved.

Google's Threat Intelligence Group notes "the growing threat to secure messaging applications." While specifically acknowledging "wide ranging efforts to compromise Signal accounts," they add that the threat "also extends to other popular messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, which are also being actively targeted by Russian-aligned threat groups using similar techniques.

"In anticipation of a wider adoption of similar tradecraft by other threat actors, we are issuing a public warning regarding the tactics and methods used to date to help build public awareness and help communities better safeguard themselves from similar threats."

Computer Weekly reports: Analysts predict it is only a matter of time before Russia starts deploying hacking techniques against non-military Signal users and users of other encrypted messaging services, including WhatsApp and Telegram. Dan Black, principal analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said he would be "absolutely shocked" if he did not see attacks against Signal expand beyond the war in Ukraine and to other encrypted messaging platforms...

Russia-backed hackers are attempting to compromise Signal's "linked devices" capability, which allows Signal users to link their messaging account to multiple devices, including phones and laptops, using a quick response (QR) code. Google threat analysts report that Russia-linked threat actors have developed malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will give the threat actor real-time access to the victim's messages without having to compromise the victim's phone or computer. In one case, according to Black, a compromised Signal account led Russia to launch an artillery strike against a Ukrainian army brigade, resulting in a number of casualties... Google also warned that multiple threat actors have been observed using exploits to steal Signal database files from compromised Android and Windows devices.
The article notes that the attacks "are difficult to detect and when successful there is a high risk that compromised Signal accounts can go unnoticed for a long time." And it adds that "The warning follows disclosures that Russian intelligence created a spoof website for the Davos World Economic Forum in January 2025 to surreptitiously attempt to gain access to WhatsApp accounts used by Ukrainian government officials, diplomats and a former investigative journalist at Bellingcat."

Google's Threat Intelligence Group notes there's a variety of attack methods, though the "linked devices" technique is the most widely used. "We are grateful to the team at Signal for their close partnership in investigating this activity," Google's group says in their blog post, adding that "the latest Signal releases on Android and iOS contain hardened features designed to help protect against similar phishing campaigns in the future. Update to the latest version to enable these features."

Microsoft's newly announced Muse AI model for game development has triggered immediate backlash from industry professionals. "Fuck this shit," responded David Goldfarb, founder of The Outsiders, arguing that such AI tools primarily serve to "reduce capital expenditure" while devaluing developers' collective artistic contributions.

Multiple developers told Wired that the tool is aimed at shareholders rather than actual developers. "Nobody will want this. They don't CARE that nobody will want this," one AAA developer said, noting that internal criticism remains muted due to job security concerns amid industry-wide layoffs.

The resistance comes as developers increasingly view AI initiatives as threats to job security rather than helpful tools. One anonymous developer called it "gross" that they needed to remain unnamed while criticizing Muse, as their studio still depends on potential Game Pass deals with Microsoft. Even in prototyping, where Microsoft sees AI potential, Creative Assembly's Marc Burrage warns that automated shortcuts could undermine crucial learning experiences in game development.

Microsoft's announcement of a breakthrough in quantum computing faces skepticism from physicists, who say evidence supporting the company's claims remains insufficient.

The tech giant reported creating Majorana particles - a development it says could revolutionize quantum computing - but the accompanying peer-reviewed paper in Nature does not conclusively demonstrate this achievement, according to multiple quantum physics experts who reviewed the research.

Microsoft's corporate vice president for quantum hardware, Chetan Nayak, acknowledged the Nature paper wasn't meant to prove the particles' existence, though he claimed measurements suggested "95% likelihood" of topological activity. The company plans to publish additional findings.

The announcement has drawn particular scrutiny given the field's history of retracted claims. Two previous Nature papers on similar discoveries were withdrawn in 2017 and 2018, while a 2020 paper in Science involving Microsoft researchers remains under review. "This is where you cross over from the realm of science to advertising," said Jay Sau, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland who sometimes consults for Microsoft but wasn't involved in the current research.

According to The Information (paywalled), OpenAI plans to shift most of its computing power from Microsoft to SoftBank-backed Stargate by 2030. TechCrunch reports: That represents a major shift away from Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest shareholder, who fulfills most of the startup's power needs today. The change won't happen overnight. OpenAI still plans to increase its spending on Microsoft-owned data centers in the next few years.

During that time, OpenAI's overall costs are set to grow dramatically. The Information reports that OpenAI projects to burn $20 billion in cash during 2027, far more than the $5 billion it reportedly burned through in 2024. By 2030, OpenAI reportedly forecasts that its costs around running AI models, also known as inference, will outpace what the startup spends on training AI models.

AI coding assistants are reshaping software development, but they're unlikely to replace human programmers entirely, according to industry experts and developers. GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke projects AI could soon generate 80-90% of corporate code, transforming developers into "conductors of an AI-empowered orchestra" who guide and direct these systems.

Current AI coding tools, including Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, are delivering 10-30% productivity gains in business environments. At KPMG, developers report saving 4.5 hours weekly using Copilot, while venture investment in AI coding assistants tripled to $1.6 billion in 2024. The tools are particularly effective at automating routine tasks like documentation generation and legacy code translation, according to KPMG AI expert Swami Chandrasekaran.

They're also accelerating onboarding for new team members. Demand for junior developers remains soft, however, though analysts say it's premature to attribute this directly to AI adoption. Training programs like Per Scholas are already adapting, incorporating AI fundamentals alongside traditional programming basics to prepare developers for an increasingly AI-augmented workplace.

Malaysia is aggressively expanding its data center capacity, positioning itself as Southeast Asia's fastest-growing market with planned investments exceeding $31 billion in the first 10 months of 2024, triple the amount from 2023.

The country's southern Johor province is set to host at least 1.6 gigawatts of data center capacity, up from nearly zero in 2019. Twenty-two mostly foreign data centers already occupy 21 hectares, with more under construction. The push comes as neighboring Singapore paused new data center construction in 2019 due to resource constraints.

Some experts are warning the expansion could strain Malaysia's power and water resources, with data center power demand potentially reaching 5 gigawatts by 2035 - more than half the country's current renewable capacity. The facilities, operated by companies including Microsoft, Equinix and China's GDS Holdings, primarily service East Asia, China and Europe rather than domestic users.

Microsoft will strip several features from Windows 11's File Explorer for European users to comply with privacy regulations, the company says. The changes, affecting Entra ID accounts in the European Economic Area, remove Recent, Favorites, Details Pane, and Recommended content sections that previously tracked user activity.

These features relied on collecting user data to display recently accessed files and personalized recommendations. The privacy-focused update, part of Windows 11 preview build 26120.3281, results in a streamlined File Explorer interface.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a while now, many AI researchers have been working to integrate a so-called "world model" into their systems. Ideally, these models could infer a simulated understanding of how in-game objects and characters should behave based on video footage alone, then create fully interactive video that instantly simulates new playable worlds based on that understanding. Microsoft Research's new World and Human Action Model (WHAM), revealed today in a paper published in the journal Nature, shows how quickly those models have advanced in a short time. But it also shows how much further we have to go before the dream of AI crafting complete, playable gameplay footage from just some basic prompts and sample video footage becomes a reality.

Much like Google's Genie model before it, WHAM starts by training on "ground truth" gameplay video and input data provided by actual players. In this case, that data comes from Bleeding Edge, a four-on-four online brawler released in 2020 by Microsoft subsidiary Ninja Theory. By collecting actual player footage since launch (as allowed under the game's user agreement), Microsoft gathered the equivalent of seven player-years' worth of gameplay video paired with real player inputs. Early in that training process, Microsoft Research's Katja Hoffman said the model would get easily confused, generating inconsistent clips that would "deteriorate [into] these blocks of color." After 1 million training updates, though, the WHAM model started showing basic understanding of complex gameplay interactions, such as a power cell item exploding after three hits from the player or the movements of a specific character's flight abilities. The results continued to improve as the researchers threw more computing resources and larger models at the problem, according to the Nature paper.

To see just how well the WHAM model generated new gameplay sequences, Microsoft tested the model by giving it up to one second's worth of real gameplay footage and asking it to generate what subsequent frames would look like based on new simulated inputs. To test the model's consistency, Microsoft used actual human input strings to generate up to two minutes of new AI-generated footage, which was then compared to actual gameplay results using the Frechet Video Distance metric. Microsoft boasts that WHAM's outputs can stay broadly consistent for up to two minutes without falling apart, with simulated footage lining up well with actual footage even as items and environments come in and out of view. That's an improvement over even the "long horizon memory" of Google's Genie 2 model, which topped out at a minute of consistent footage. Microsoft also tested WHAM's ability to respond to a diverse set of randomized inputs not found in its training data. These tests showed broadly appropriate responses to many different input sequences based on human annotations of the resulting footage, even as the best models fell a bit short of the "human-to-human baseline."

The most interesting result of Microsoft's WHAM tests, though, might be in the persistence of in-game objects. Microsoft provided examples of developers inserting images of new in-game objects or characters into pre-existing gameplay footage. The WHAM model could then incorporate that new image into its subsequent generated frames, with appropriate responses to player input or camera movements. With just five edited frames, the new object "persisted" appropriately in subsequent frames anywhere from 85 to 98 percent of the time, according to the Nature paper.

After two decades of quantum computing research, Microsoft has unveiled its first quantum chip: the Majorana 1. CNBC reports: Microsoft's quantum chip employs eight topological qubits using indium arsenide, which is a semiconductor, and aluminum, which is a superconductor. A new paper in the journal Nature describes the chip in detail. Microsoft won't be allowing clients to use its Majorana 1 chip through the company's Azure public cloud, as it plans to do with its custom artificial intelligence chip, Maia 100. Instead, Majorana 1 is a step toward a goal of a million qubits on a chip, following extensive physics research.

Rather than rely on Taiwan Semiconductor or another company for fabrication, Microsoft is manufacturing the components of Majorana 1 itself in the U.S. That's possible because the work is unfolding at a small scale. "We want to get to a few hundred qubits before we start talking about commercial reliability," Jason Zander, a Microsoft executive vice president, told CNBC. In the meantime, the company will engage with national laboratories and universities on research using Majorana 1.

Microsoft has placed its new AI-powered text rewrite feature in Notepad behind a subscription paywall, requiring users to have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plan to access the functionality. While the core text editor remains free and accessible without a Microsoft account, the AI feature requires users to sign in and have sufficient "AI credits" included in their subscription.Users can disable the feature and hide its icon if they choose not to subscribe.

Microsoft is reminding IT administrators that WSUS driver synchronization will be deprecated on April 18, 2025, urging them to transition to cloud-based update solutions like Windows Autopatch, Azure Update Manager, and Microsoft Intune. "For on-premises contexts, drivers will be available on the Microsoft Update catalog, but you won't be able to import them into WSUS," the company said in a Windows message center update on Tuesday. "You'll need to use any of the available alternative solutions, such as Device Driver Packages, or transition to cloud-based driver services for your organization, such as Microsoft Intune and Windows Autopatch." BleepingComputer reports: This reminder follows two other warnings issued since June 2024, announcing the deprecation of WSUS driver synchronization and encouraging customers to adopt Redmond's newer cloud-based driver services. The company also revealed in September 2024 that WSUS had been deprecated, but Microsoft added that it plans to keep publishing updates through the channel and maintain all existing capabilities. This announcement came after WSUS was listed on August 13 as one of the "features removed or no longer developed starting with Windows Server 2025."

"Specifically, this means that we are no longer investing in new capabilities, nor are we accepting new feature requests for WSUS," Microsoft's Nir Froimovici said at the time. "However, we are preserving current functionality and will continue to publish updates through the WSUS channel. We will also support any content already published through the WSUS channel."

Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has attributed the current wave of video game industry layoffs and slowdown to companies overextending during the COVID-19 pandemic. "I think it's an overreaction to the COVID situation. Companies invested too much, including ourselves. Then we had to face reality and make adjustments," Yoshida told VentureBeat in an interview.

Yoshida, who left Sony in January after 31 years at PlayStation, suggested the industry's growth would have been more stable without the pandemic-driven surge. "If you take out the COVID years you'd have smoother growth over the years," he said. Yoshida's comments come amid widespread job cuts across the gaming sector, including at Sony, Microsoft, Epic Games, and other major publishers following a post-pandemic decline in gaming engagement.

A new study (PDF) from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that increased reliance on AI tools leads to a decline in critical thinking skills. Gizmodo reports: The researchers tapped 319 knowledge workers -- a person whose job involves handling data or information -- and asked them to self-report details of how they use generative AI tools in the workplace. The participants were asked to report tasks that they were asked to do, how they used AI tools to complete them, how confident they were in the AI's ability to do the task, their ability to evaluate that output, and how confident they were in their own ability to complete the same task without any AI assistance.

Over the course of the study, a pattern revealed itself: the more confident the worker was in the AI's capability to complete the task, the more often they could feel themselves letting their hands off the wheel. The participants reported a "perceived enaction of critical thinking" when they felt like they could rely on the AI tool, presenting the potential for over-reliance on the technology without examination. This was especially true for lower-stakes tasks, the study found, as people tended to be less critical. While it's very human to have your eyes glaze over for a simple task, the researchers warned that this could portend to concerns about "long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving."

By contrast, when the workers had less confidence in the ability of AI to complete the assigned task, the more they found themselves engaging in their critical thinking skills. In turn, they typically reported more confidence in their ability to evaluate what the AI produced and improve upon it on their own. Another noteworthy finding of the study: users who had access to generative AI tools tended to produce "a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task" compared to those without.

Hector Martin has resigned as the project lead of Asahi Linux, weeks after stepping down from his role as a Linux kernel maintainer for Apple ARM support. His departure from Asahi follows a contentious exchange with Linus Torvalds over development processes and social media advocacy. After quitting kernel maintenance earlier this month, the conflict escalated when Martin suggested that "shaming on social media" might be necessary to effect change.

Torvalds sharply rejected this approach, stating that "social media brigading just makes me not want to have anything at all to do with your approach" and suggested that Martin himself might be the problem. In his final resignation announcement from Asahi, Martin wrote: "I no longer have any faith left in the kernel development process or community management approach."

The dispute reflects deeper tensions in the Linux kernel community, particularly around the integration of Rust code. It follows the August departure of another key Rust for Linux maintainer, Wedson Almeida Filho from Microsoft. According to Sonatype's research, more than 300,000 open source projects have slowed or halted updates since 2020.