All posts tagged: Microsofts

Microsoft’s Surface Mouse is back, now with haptic feedback – and I need it

Microsoft’s Surface Mouse is back, now with haptic feedback – and I need it

Published by Miika Tikkanen

ZDNET’s key takeaways Microsoft is launching a new Surface Mouse with haptic feedback. The mouse also comes with a customizable action button. Priced at $80 the new Surface mouse will reach stores on October 13. I’ve tried a lot of different mice with my Windows desktops and laptops. But the ones made by Microsoft have always been my favorites. I’ve used both the IntelliMouse and the Surface Mouse; however, both have been unavailable from Microsoft for years. Now, the Surface Mouse is finally making a comeback. Also: Microsoft’s most underrated Surface accessories are coming to business users In a blog post announcing new Surface devices, Microsoft snuck in a surprise about a new Surface Mouse soon to hit the market. Available in stores on October 13 and priced at $80, the new mouse marks the first return of this classic device since the original launched in 2016. This one, though, comes with a few twists. Haptic feedback and customizable actions The new mouse offers haptic feedback, which means you’ll feel a sensation when you click …

Microsoft’s AI Efforts Are Faceplanting

Microsoft’s AI Efforts Are Faceplanting

Published by José Betancourt

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Sven Hoppe / picture alliance via Getty Images Microsoft has continued to focus more and more on AI — almost certainly at the expense of its core products, like the Windows operating system. And unfortunately for the Redmond giant, the gambit doesn’t seem to be paying off. Current and former employees tell The Wall Street Journal in new reporting that the company’s confusing branding and grating lack of cohesion between its products has frustrated and turned off users. And data reviewed by the newspaper shows that a vanishingly small percentage of its enterprise customers prefer using its AI chatbot and assistant Copilot, which appears to be losing ground to its competitors at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The report comes after a historically miserable day at the stock market for Microsoft last week, which saw its share price collapse by nearly 12 percent, a sign of investor doubts over CEO Satya Nadella’s AI-first vision and the company’s exorbitant spending in its pursuit. Microsoft is certainly giving OpenAI a run for …

How Microsoft’s next-gen BitNet architecture is turbocharging LLM efficiency

How Microsoft’s next-gen BitNet architecture is turbocharging LLM efficiency

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More One-bit large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising approach to making generative AI more accessible and affordable. By representing model weights with a very limited number of bits, 1-bit LLMs dramatically reduce the memory and computational resources required to run them. Microsoft Research has been pushing the boundaries of 1-bit LLMs with its BitNet architecture. In a new paper, the researchers introduce BitNet a4.8, a new technique that further improves the efficiency of 1-bit LLMs without sacrificing their performance. The rise of 1-bit LLMs Traditional LLMs use 16-bit floating-point numbers (FP16) to represent their parameters. This requires a lot of memory and compute resources, which limits the accessibility and deployment options for LLMs. One-bit LLMs address this challenge by drastically reducing the precision of model weights while matching the performance of full-precision models. Previous BitNet models used 1.58-bit values (-1, 0, 1) to represent model weights and 8-bit values for activations. This approach significantly …