Microsoft AI just announced its first text-to-image generator, MAI-Image-1, designed and developed in-house. The tech giant, which recently announced its first in-house Microsoft AI models, called the new image generator “the next step on our journey.”

Microsoft says it sought feedback from creative professionals in order to avoid “repetitive or generically-stylized outputs.” MAI-Image-1 “excels” at photorealistic imagery like lightning, landscapes, and more, the company claims. And it can process requests and produce images faster than “larger, slower models.” The model has already secured a spot in the top 10 of LMArena, the AI benchmark site where humans compare outputs from different systems and vote on the best one. — Read More

During China’s yearslong crackdown on the tech sector, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s internal messaging boards lit up with dreams to “MAGA” – Make Alibaba Great Again. Now, the company is deploying one of its most potent weapons to accomplish that mission: Jack Ma.

After vanishing from the public eye at the outset of an antitrust investigation in late 2020, China’s most recognizable entrepreneur is back on Alibaba’s campuses – and he’s more directly involved than he’s been in half a decade, according to people familiar with the company. Signs of his unseen hand are coming into sharper focus, perhaps no more so than in the company’s pivot to artificial intelligence and its declaration of war on e-commerce foes JD.com Inc. and Meituan. Ma was instrumental in Alibaba’s decision to spend as much as 50 billion yuan ($7 billion) on subsidies to beat back JD’s surprise entry to the market, said one of the people, requesting not to be named because the matter is private. — Read More

Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. One of the biggest topics in AI these days is agents — the idea that AI is going to move from chatbots to reliably completing tasks for us in the real world. But the problem with agents is that they really aren’t all that reliable right now.

There’s a lot of work happening in the AI industry to try to fix that, and that brings me to my guest today: David Luan, the head of Amazon’s AGI research lab. I’ve been wanting to chat with David for a long time. He was an early research leader at OpenAI, where he helped drive the development of GPT-2, GPT-3, and DALL-E. After OpenAI, he cofounded Adept, an AI research lab focused on agents. And last summer, he left Adept to join Amazon, where he now leads the company’s AGI lab in San Francisco.

We recorded this episode right after the release of OpenAI’s GPT-5, which gave us an opportunity to talk about why he thinks progress on AI models has slowed. The work that David’s team is doing is a big priority for Amazon, and this is the first time I’ve heard him really lay out what he’s been up to. — Read More

“You see? Another ad. We were just talking about this yesterday! How can you be so sure they’re not listening to us?” – My wife, at least once a week.

Internet advertising has gotten so good, it’s spooky. We worry about how much “they” know about us, but in exchange, we got something future generations may not: free content and services, and a mostly open Internet. It is unprecedented Faustian bargain, one that is now collapsing.

At the epicenter of the modern Internet sits Google. Forget the East India Company, Google, with an absurd +$100B in net income, is arguably the most successful business in history. By commanding nearly 70% of the global browser market and 89% of the search engine market, they dominated Internet through sheer reach. How did this happen? A delicate balance of incentives where every player on the Internet got exactly what they wanted. — Read More

Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that he’s creating Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by some of his company’s most recent hires, including Scale AI ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Zuckerberg said the new AI superintelligence unit, MSL, will house the company’s various teams working on foundation models such as the open-source Llama software, products and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research projects, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC. — Read More

The leader of Meta’s Superintelligence lab, Alexandr Wang, 28, is one of the priciest hires anywhere.

Meta has made offers to dozens of researchers at OpenAI. The startup has responded to Zuckerberg’s blitz with impressive packages of its own.

Not everyone on Meta’s list gets $100 million, though they’re still fetching astronomical sums. — Read More

This is how I opened January 2023’s AI and the Big Five:

The story of 2022 was the emergence of AI, first with image generation models, including DALL-E, MidJourney, and the open source Stable Diffusion, and then ChatGPT, the first text-generation model to break through in a major way. It seems clear to me that this is a new epoch in technology.

Sometimes the accuracy of a statement is measured by its banality, and that certainly seems to be the case here: AI is the new epoch, consuming the mindshare of not just Stratechery but also the companies I cover. To that end, two-and-a-half years on, I thought it would be useful to revisit that 2023 analysis and re-evaluate the state of AI’s biggest players, primarily through the lens of the Big Five: Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The proximate cause for this reevaluation is the apparent five alarm fire that is happening at Meta: the company’s latest Llama 4 release was disappointing — and in at least one case, deceptive — pushing founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to go on a major spending spree for talent.  — Read More

Questions deserve answers, ideas beg for realization, and curiosity seeks satisfaction. Two years ago, we brought this belief forward with Bing Image Creator, helping users everywhere create whatever they can imagine through words—for free. Last month, we continued the next evolution of search with Copilot Search in Bing, blending the best of traditional and generative search to meet you where you are at in your discovery journey.

Today we’re taking the next leap with Bing Video Creator, allowing you to turn your ideas into videos, for free. Powered by Sora, Bing Video Creator transforms your text prompts into short videos. Just describe what you want to see and watch your vision come to life. — Read More

A few years ago, most Google executives didn’t talk about A.G.I. — artificial general intelligence, the industry term for a human-level A.I. system. Even if they thought A.G.I. might be technically possible, the idea seemed so remote that it was barely worth discussing.

But this week, at Google’s annual developer conference, A.G.I. was in the air. The company announced a slate of new releases tied to Google’s Gemini A.I. models, including new features designed to let users write A.I.-generated emails, create A.I.-generated videos and songs, and chat with an A.I. bot on the flagship search engine. Google’s leaders traded guesses about when more powerful systems might arrive. And they predicted profound changes ahead, as A.I. tools become more capable and autonomous.

The man most responsible for making Google “A.G.I.-pilled” — industry shorthand for the way people can become gripped by the notion that A.G.I. is imminent — is Demis Hassabis.

… This week on “Hard Fork,” we interviewed Mr. Hassabis about his views on A.G.I. and the strange futures that might follow its arrival. You can listen to our conversation by clicking the “Play” button below or by following the show on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Or, if you prefer to read, you’ll find an edited transcript of our conversation, which begins about 24 minutes into the podcast, below. — Read More

We launched AI Overviews last year at I/O, and since then there’s been a profound shift in how people are using Google Search. People are coming to Google to ask more of their questions, including more complex, longer and multimodal questions.

AI in Search is making it easier to ask Google anything and get a helpful response, with links to the web. That’s why AI Overviews is one of the most successful launches in Search in the past decade. As people use AI Overviews, we see they’re happier with their results, and they search more often. In our biggest markets like the U.S. and India, AI Overviews is driving over 10% increase in usage of Google for the types of queries that show AI Overviews ¹ . This means that once people use AI Overviews, they’re coming to do more of these types of queries, and what’s particularly exciting is how this growth increases over time. And we’re delivering this at the speed people expect of Google Search — AI Overviews delivers the fastest AI responses in the industry.

We’re continuing to advance Search with AI, and today at I/O, we showed the latest in how we’re building the future of Search, as we go beyond information to intelligence. Here’s a look at everything we announced. — Read More