Microsoft is killing its AI mascot, ten months after building it
Microsoft is killing its AI mascot, ten months after building it

The cull lands on Tuesday. Group Chat, Podcasts, Copilot Labs and consumer Deep Research all retire that day, according to Microsoft’s own support page. Mico goes at the same time, out of the voice experience and into Learn Live as a tutor. The whole t…

Microsoft told Google it was overreacting in 2010. It has spent five years quietly leaving China
Microsoft told Google it was overreacting in 2010. It has spent five years quietly leaving China

Corporate filings show the closures, Reuters reported in an exclusive. The revenue figure is the one that explains the rest. China accounted for 1.5% of global revenue as of 2024. Microsoft has no current plan to exit. It has simply stopped growing the…

Lightspeed is selling its OpenAI stake to a fund it will also run
Lightspeed is selling its OpenAI stake to a fund it will also run

The firm calls the deal Project Mercury, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with it. It gathers assets from two Lightspeed funds, Select V and Opportunity II, plus a separately managed account. OpenAI is the anchor. Coller Capital is the lead b…

A Massachusetts teen is charged with killing his mother and brother, and prosecutors point to ChatGPT
A Massachusetts teen is charged with killing his mother and brother, and prosecutors point to ChatGPT

A 17-year-old in Massachusetts has been charged with murdering his mother and younger brother, and prosecutors say that in the period before the deaths he had used ChatGPT to explore what they described as fantasy scenarios about killing his family. It…

Europe built the world’s largest electric plane. It flew in New York
Europe built the world’s largest electric plane. It flew in New York

Heart Aerospace flew its X1 demonstrator at Plattsburgh International Airport on 12 August, the company announced. The aircraft taxied, took off, climbed, manoeuvred and landed. It reached 335 metres, and its all-electric propulsion produced more than …

Anthropic’s $2trn IPO is priced below what AI stocks already fetch
Anthropic’s $2trn IPO is priced below what AI stocks already fetch

The number comes from investors, not the company. Six backers told the Financial Times that rising revenue would let the five-year-old lab more than double its valuation in an autumn listing. At $2 trillion it would eclipse SpaceX, which went public at…

Instagram changed its logo. The bit you actually tap is the same
Instagram changed its logo. The bit you actually tap is the same

Instagram changed its wordmark on Thursday. A wordmark is the written name, the word “Instagram” as it appears at the top of the app. It is not the icon. The pink and orange gradient square on your home screen is untouched. The change itself is small. …

SK Hynix is spending $720bn as its shares fall by half
SK Hynix is spending $720bn as its shares fall by half

High-bandwidth memory is the part of an AI system that nobody photographs. It sits next to the processor and feeds it data, and if it is too slow the expensive chip waits. It is made by stacking ordinary DRAM, the same memory that goes into laptops and…

Josh Kushner raised $2bn to buy the companies AI is coming for
Josh Kushner raised $2bn to buy the companies AI is coming for

Almost every AI business sells a product. Someone builds a model or a tool, licenses it, and hopes the customer works out what to do with it. Thrive Holdings inverts that. It buys accounting firms and IT services companies outright, puts its own engine…

CodeRabbit raised $143m to read the code AI wrote
CodeRabbit raised $143m to read the code AI wrote

Code review is the step where somebody reads a change before it ships. A developer proposes an edit, opens what the trade calls a pull request, and a colleague checks it for bugs and security holes. It is slow and unglamorous work. Until recently it wa…