OpenAI is launching GPT-4.5 today, its newest and largest model. GPT-4.5 will be available as a research preview, and OpenAI is calling it the company’s “largest and most knowledgeable model yet,” but warning that it’s not a frontier model and might not perform as well as o1 or o3-mini.
GPT-4.5 will have better writing capabilities, improved world knowledge, and what OpenAI calls a “refined personality over previous models,” but it won’t introduce enough new capabilities to be considered a frontier model. “GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model, but it is OpenAI’s largest LLM, improving on GPT-4’s computational efficiency by more than 10x,” OpenAI says OpenAI says in a document that leaked ahead of its announcement. “It does not introduce 7 net-new frontier capabilities compared to previous reasoning releases, and its performance is below that of o1, o3-mini, and deep research on most preparedness evaluations.”
It was previously reported that OpenAI was using its o1 reasoning model, code named Strawberry, to train GPT-4.5 with synthetic data. OpenAI says it has trained GPT-4.5 “using new supervision techniques combined with traditional methods like supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), similar to those used for GPT-4o.”
Despite some of its limitations, GPT-4.5 hallucinates a lot less than GPT-4o, according to OpenAI, and slightly less than its o1 model. Leaks earlier this week suggested GPT-4.5 will be limited to ChatGPT Pro users, much like how Operator was released. OpenAI is about to hold a stream where it will share more information on how GPT-4.5 will be released.
I revealed in Notepad last week that OpenAI was planning to launch GPT-4.5 by the end of February, and GPT-5 as soon as late May. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has referred to GPT-5 as a “system that integrates a lot of our technology,” and it will include OpenAI’s new o3 reasoning model, which the company teased during its 12 days of Christmas announcements in December.
While OpenAI released o3-mini last month, OpenAI is only shipping o3 as part of its upcoming GPT-5 system. This aligns with OpenAI’s goal to combine its large language models to eventually create a more capable model that could be labeled as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
Microsoft might say its top priority right now is security, but itâs been clear for months that AI is just as important. The odd division out has been Xbox, which hasnât discussed its use of AI much in public. But that changed last week when Microsoft ripped the band-aid off and waded, somewhat clumsily, into the debate over AI in gaming.
Last Wednesday, Microsoft revealed Muse, its new AI model that can generate gameplay. It was trained on Ninja Theoryâs Xbox game Bleeding Edge, and it can understand a 3D world and physics and then respond to playersâ interactions. While Muse is a Microsoft Research project at heart, Microsoft presented it in a way that linked it directly to Xbox and the future of the companyâs gaming efforts. That has divided opinion between those who argue that Microsoft will use this model to build games and lay off developers, and others who think this is still very early and simply another tool in a game developerâs kit.
Iâve been speaking to game developers over the past week to get a better understanding of the response to Muse. Of the handful Iâve spoken to, no one is willing to speak on the record for reasons like career concerns and th …
Sony is cutting the price of its PlayStation VR 2 headset in March. The VR 2 will be discounted to just $399.99, down from the original $549 pricing when it launched in February 2023. The headset will also see a price cut in Europe (€449.99), the UK (£399.99), Japan (¥66,980), and other regions.
Sony is positioning the price cut as a “fantastic time to dive into the exciting world of PS VR2,” but it also comes nearly a year after the company reportedly paused PSVR 2 production to clear excess inventory nearly . A Bloomberg report in March suggested Sony was trying to shift unsold inventory of the VR2 headset, and this fresh price cut suggests that the PS5 accessory still isn’t selling as well as Sony had hoped.
At $549, it was more expensive than the PS5 itself, and a lack of content has certainly held it back. The $399 pricing could certainly help shift units, particularly as you can also use the VR 2 headset on a PC now thanks to Sony’s $60 adapter. Sony is also reportedly working on Apple Vision Pro support for its PSVR 2 controllers, which we might hear about at some point this year.
Microsoft made OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model free for all Copilot users last month, and now it’s providing unlimited use of this model and Copilot’s voice capabilities to everyone. Previously, both Think Deeper (powered by o1) and Voice in Copilot had limits for free users, but Microsoft is removing these today to allow Copilot users to have extended conversations with the company’s AI assistant.
“We are working hard to scale unlimited access to advanced features to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, starting today with Voice and Think Deeper,” says the Copilot team. “It’s worth noting you may experience delays or interruptions during periods of high demand or if we detect security concerns, misuse or other violations of the Copilot Terms.“
The unlimited use of Copilot Voice and Think Deeper comes two years after Microsoft first launched Copilot inside its Bing search engine, and just a month after the software maker revamped its Copilot Pro subscription and bundled Office AI features into Microsoft 365.
Microsoft is continuing to sell its $20 per month Copilot Pro subscription, and says users “will retain preferred access to our latest models during peak usage, early access to experimental AI features (more on that coming soon), and additional use of Copilot in select Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.”
Microsoft has decided to delay the release window of its upcoming Fable game to 2026. The Xbox maker originally said last year that Fable would arrive at some point in 2025, but now Xbox Game Studios chief Craig Duncan has provided an update on the game during an appearance on the official Xbox podcast.
“We previously announced the date for Fable as 2025, we are actually going to give Fable more time and it’s going to ship in 2026 now,” says Duncan. “While I know that’s not maybe the news people want to hear, what I want to assure people of is that it’s definitely worth the wait. I have unequivocable confidence in the Playground team.”
We got to see some early gameplay footage of Fable at last year’s Xbox summer showcase, which was largely focused on the characters and story of the fantasy game. Fable will be centered on a hero named Humphry, who “will be forced out of retirement when a mysterious figure from his past threatens Albion’s very existence.” Microsoft provided a little more gameplay footage today, too.
Playground Games is the developer behind this latest Fable installment, best-known for their work on the Forza Horizon series. “What they’re bringing to the Fable franchise, just think of the visuals of what you expect from Playground Games, plus amazing gameplay, British humor, and Playground’s take… in quite frankly the most beautifully realized version of Albion that you’ve ever seen,” says Duncan.
Microsoft still has a busy year of Xbox games ahead, including South of Midnight, id Software’s Doom: The Dark Ages, The Outer Worlds 2, and potentially even Gears of War: E-Day.
Microsoft has started testing a free version of Office for Windows that includes ads. Right now, you have to pay for a monthly Microsoft 365 subscription to get access to the full desktop version of Office, but Microsoft has been quietly testing an ad-supported version in certain countries.
Beebom first noticed that the ad-supported version of Office for Windows appeared in India recently, allowing Windows users to access Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office apps without the Microsoft 365 subscription fee.
“Microsoft has been conducting some limited testing. Currently, there are no plans to launch a free, ad-supported version of Microsoft Office desktop apps,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to PCWorld. While Microsoft claims this is limited testing, the company has specifically engineered its Office apps to now work on Windows with ads, so we may well see this version appear in more markets eventually.
The ad-supported version of Office includes banners that are permanently visible at the side, as well as 15-second video ads that play every few hours, according to Beebom. Microsoft also forces users of this free version of Office to store documents in OneDrive, with support for local file storage disabled.
Microsoft currently only offers free versions of Office on the web, so you have to use a browser to access far more limited versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This test version of Office for Windows doesn’t include the full features of the apps, either. Word is missing drawing and design tools, line spacing, and more. The free version of Excel doesn’t support add-ins, pivot tables, or macros. PowerPoint is also missing support for dictation, custom slide shows, and other features.
Microsoft engineers are currently readying server capacity for OpenAIâs upcoming GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 models, according to a source familiar with the companyâs plans. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altmanacknowledged recently that GPT-4.5 will launch within a matter of weeks, I understand that Microsoft is expecting to host the new AI model as early as next week.
Codenamed Orion, GPT-4.5 is OpenAIâs next frontier model and the companyâs last non-chain-of-thought model. OpenAI has already teased that GPT-4.5 could be a lot more powerful than GPT-4, but the company is also looking ahead to its GPT-5 model that will include more significant changes.
Iâm told that Microsoft is expecting GPT-5 in late May, which aligns with Altmanâs promise of the next-gen model arriving within a matter of months. As always, this date could shift if release plans change. We reported in October that OpenAI was originally planning to release GPT-4.5 by the end of 2024, but this was subsequently delayed to early 2025.
GPT-5 will likely be the more significant release out of the pair, and Altman has referred to it as a âsystem that integrates a lot of our technology.â It also includes OpenAIâs new …
Microsoft believes it has made a key breakthrough in quantum computing, unlocking the potential for quantum computers to solve industrial-scale problems. The software giant has spent 17 years working on a research project to create a new material and architecture for quantum computing, and it’s unveiling the Majorana 1 processor, Microsoft’s first quantum processor based on this new architecture.
At the core of a quantum computer are qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing much like the binary bits that computers use today. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google have all been trying to make qubits as reliable as binary bits for years now because they’re a lot more delicate and sensitive to noise that can create errors or lead to loss of data.
Majorana 1 can potentially fit a million qubits onto a single chip that’s not much bigger than the CPUs inside desktop PCs and servers. Microsoft isn’t using electrons for the compute in this new chip; it’s using the Majorana particle that theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana described in 1937. Microsoft has reached this milestone by creating what it calls the “world’s first topoconductor,” a new type of material that can not only observe but also control Majorana particles to create more reliable qubits.
Microsoft has outlined its research in a peer-reviewed paper published today in Nature, explaining how its researchers were able to create the topological qubit. Microsoft has helped create a new material made from indium arsenide and aluminum, and it has placed eight topological qubits on a chip that it hopes can eventually scale to 1 million.
A single chip with a million qubits could perform simulations that are a lot more accurate and help improve the understanding of the natural world and unlock breakthroughs in medicine and material science. That’s been the promise of quantum computing for years now, and Microsoft believes its topoconductor, or topological superconductor, is the next big breakthrough.
“Our leadership has been working on this program for the last 17 years. It’s the longest-running research program in the company,” explains Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president of quantum at Microsoft. “After 17 years, we are showcasing results that are not just incredible, they’re real. They will fundamentally redefine how the next stage of the quantum journey takes place.”
Alam previously worked on HoloLens and the fabrication techniques that have helped Microsoft in its push toward quantum computing. Microsoft’s quantum computing team is made up of researchers, scientists, and Microsoft technical fellows that have dedicated years to the company’s effort to build a scalable quantum computer based on topological qubits.
“We took a step back and said ‘Ok, let’s invent the transistor for the quantum age. What properties does it need to have?’” says Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow. “And that’s really how we got here — it’s the particular combination, the quality and the important details in our new materials stack that have enabled a new kind of qubit and ultimately our entire architecture.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has now selected Microsoft as one of two companies that will advance to the final phase of its Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC). Microsoft will now build a fault-tolerant prototype quantum computer based on topological qubits “in years, not decades.”
“A million-qubit quantum computer isn’t just a milestone — it’s a gateway to solving some of the world’s most difficult problems,” says Nayak. “Our path to useful quantum computing is clear. The foundational technology is proven, and we believe our architecture is scalable. Our new agreement with DARPA shows a commitment to relentless progress toward our goal: building a machine that can drive scientific discovery and solve problems that matter.“
I reported in November that Microsoft was about to start a bigger effort to bring AI features to Xbox, and today, the company is unveiling what it’s calling a breakthrough in AI for gaming. Microsoft’s new Muse AI model could help Xbox developers create parts of games in the future, and the company says it’s even exploring the potential of using it to preserve classic games and optimize them for modern hardware.
Microsoft Research has created Muse, a first-of-its-kind generative AI model that can generate a game environment based on visuals or players’ controller actions. It understands a 3D game world and game physics and can react to how players interact with a game.
“This allows the model to create consistent and diverse gameplay rendered by AI, demonstrating a major step toward generative AI models that can empower game creators,” explains Fatima Kardar, corporate vice president of gaming AI at Microsoft.
The Muse model was trained on a large amount of human gameplay data from the Xbox game Bleeding Edge thanks to a collaboration between Microsoft Research and Xbox studio Ninja Theory — both of which are based in Cambridge in the UK. “This partnership allowed us to closely collaborate with the game studio to understand what needs to be in place and how we can responsibly unlock access to a large amount of gameplay data,” says Katja Hofmann, head of Microsoft Research’s game intelligence team.
This allowed Muse to access the equivalent of seven years of human gameplay, resulting in the model being trained on a billion image action pairs in total. It’s a milestone research project that’s being published in Nature today, but as it’s early work, the model is limited to generating gameplay visuals at a resolution of just 300×180 pixels. That’s up from the 128 x 128 resolution of Microsoft’s earlier work on generative AI gaming models, but it’s still far behind the 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution that is common among PC gamers.
Microsoft has released a number of examples of the Muse model in action, generating gameplay and even allowing players to load visual elements into the game to prompt the model. This could be used for the early iteration stages of a game, but Microsoft is stressing this isn’t designed to generate an entire game and replace creators.
Gaming is coming to Copilot! Get your keyboards/controllers ready, I can't wait for you to try it out.
“For Xbox, the principles that drive our approach to AI are to create more value for players and game creators, bring more games to more people around the world, and recognize that the development of a great game will always be grounded in the creator’s vision and artistry,” says Kardar. “We believe generative AI has the potential to enhance this creativity and unlock new possibilities.”
During a press briefing, Hofmann also demonstrated a real-time version of Muse that Microsoft is currently experimenting with to enable interactive AI-powered games. The demo generated game visuals on the fly in real time and even reacted to objects being dropped into the game to change the environment. While the real-time gameplay only ran at 10fps and a 300×180 resolution, it was an early demonstration of what might be possible in the future.
Microsoft is now exploring how Muse could help improve classic games and bring them to modern hardware. “You could imagine a world where from gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run,” says Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer. “We’ve talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity.”
Microsoft is also exploring how Muse can help game developers prototype games or how teams could add new AI-powered experiences to existing titles. Some short interactive AI game experiences will be available on Copilot Labs soon for people to try out. Microsoft is also planning to share AI tools and experiments with Xbox players and creators “earlier on” so that it can “make sure that our AI innovations address real problems and add new value to creating or playing with Xbox.”
While Microsoft is still in the exploration phase of AI in gaming, it’s also making it clear it’s up to individual studios at Xbox how they want to use AI in games. “As part of this, we have empowered creative leaders here at Xbox to decide on the use of generative AI. There isn’t going to be a single solution for every game or project, and the approach will be based on the creative vision and goals of each team,” says Kardar.
There is already a lot of fear from game developers and studios about how AI could affect the creative process of making games, particularly at a time when barely a week goes by without layoffs in the gaming industry. A recent report revealed that 1 in 10 game developers lost their jobs in 2024 alone.
“We don’t intend to use this technology for the creation of content,” says Ninja Theory studio head Dom Matthews. “I think the interesting aspect for us that’s exciting, is how can we use technology like this to make the process of making games quicker and easier for our talented team, so that they can really focus on the thing that’s really special about games: the human creativity.”
Nvidiaâs new RTX 5070 Ti graphics card is the most intriguing entry in the 50-series lineup so far, promising to outperform last-gen cards that were even more expensive. At $749, it comfortably beats AMDâs $899 RX 7900 XT, trades blows with the $999 RX 7900 XTX, and is closer than I was expecting to Nvidiaâs own $999 RTX 5080. Itâs a capable card for a relatively good price, and that makes the RTX 5070 Ti an ideal choice if youâre tempted to move to 4K gaming or want a card that can deliver high frame rates for 1440p.
But like the rest of the 50-series cards, the RTX 5070 Ti is not as much of an upgrade as weâve come to expect from Nvidia. The card is around 14 percent faster at 4K than the last-generation RTX 4070 Ti and 22 percent faster at 1440p. Itâs nearly as fast as the RTX 4080 Super, which launched at $999, and itâs more than 80 percent faster at 4K than the two-generations-old RTX 3070 Ti. Those are decent numbers, but itâs mostly because the 40 series was such a big leap.
All of this makes the RTX 5070 Ti a good deal at its $749 MSRP, but only if it stays there â and prices are already going up.
Editorâs note: We arenât scoring the RTX 5070 T …
Microsoft was planning to make some changes to the way you sign in to a Microsoft account in February, keeping accounts signed in automatically unless you sign out or use private browsing. While the changes were communicated to Outlook.com users through a notification and in a now-removed Microsoft support article, Microsoft has now confirmed to The Verge that this was a mistake.
“There will be no changes to Microsoft users’ commercial (Microsoft Entra) or consumer (Microsoft account) sign in experiences in February,” confirms Alex Simons, corporate vice president of identity & network access program management at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. “Media reports were based on incomplete information mistakenly published by a Microsoft product team. The incorrect notifications have been removed.”
Microsoft hasn’t clarified when it plans to eventually roll out these changes after the mistaken notifications, but once they arrive it means you’ll no longer be asked if you want to stay signed in, and Microsoft will automatically keep you signed in instead.
Once Microsoft starts to automatically keep you signed in you’ll have to use a private browsing window on public PCs or make sure you remember to sign out once your session ends, otherwise the account will remain signed in.
Microsoft is adding a super useful button to Outlook mobile that will let you quickly minimize a draft email and task switch on the go. If you’re like me and you send a lot of emails from your iPhone or Android device, it can be really annoying to have to switch out of a draft email and find a date in your calendar or look at another email thread and then have to navigate back to your drafts folder and resume your email.
Outlook’s new minimize button will put all your recent drafts into a little floating stack so you can switch between composing an email and looking at other emails or calendar events without having to head back into the drafts folder. It’s a small change that will make a big difference to drafting emails on the go with Outlook.
Microsoft has started testing this new minimize button in beta versions of Outlook on iOS and Android recently, and in the short couple of days I’ve been testing the feature it has already made something I do every day a lot faster and convenient.
Apple has a similar method for task switching during emails in its native Mail app for iOS, and it also supports multiple email drafts where you can simply swipe down to add them to a task switching area. Gmail, on iOS at least, simply stores emails in the draft folder when you want to switch out to your inbox.
The minimize button in Outlook mobile is also starting to gradually roll out to all users, but you can sign up to the Microsoft 365 Insider program if you want to get it a little early.
Iâve been thinking a lot about the next Xbox lately. While Microsoft publicly lines up a busy year of game releases and ports for the PS5 and Switch 2, the company has also been secretly building its future Xbox hardware and platform. There havenât been any giant leaks about next-gen hardware yet, but Microsoft has been dropping hints over the past year that make it clear the next Xbox is going to be a lot different from the box that exists right now.
Microsoft is developing new console hardware that Xbox president Sarah Bond has said will deliver âthe largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation.â Weâve heard very little about next-gen hardware since that promise a year ago, and a lot has changed since internal documents from 2022 leaked and hinted that the next Xbox could arrive in 2028.
Xbox chief Phil Spencer said in a recent interview that he wants Microsoft âto innovate and make hardware the differentiator.â Spencer told me something similar a year ago, saying that Microsoft is âthinking about creating hardware that sells to gamers because of the unique aspects of the hardware. Itâs kind of an unleashing of the creative capabili …
Bethesda is adding DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation and DLSS Ray Reconstruction to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in an update due next week. Both technologies will improve the image quality of Indiana Jones, and Multi Frame Generation will also enable smoother frame rates in the process.
Nvidia has released a new Game Ready driver today (572.42) that includes support for the Indiana Jones improvements. Both the DLSS Super Resolution and DLAA features of the game will be updated to work with Nvidia’s new transformer-based AI models, and Bethesda is also adding fully ray-traced shadows to the game.
“Using DLSS Ray Reconstruction, surface detail is improved, shadows are more precise, lighting is enhanced, and reflections more accurate,” explains Nvidia. “Even in darker scenes, temples, and forests, DLSS Ray Reconstruction adds an extra level of refinement to the image.”
The transformer AI model change also promises to improve image quality throughout Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and RTX 50-series owners will be able to enable Multi Frame Generation to get smoother frame rates.
Nvidia’s latest Game Ready driver also includes day one support for Obsidian’s Avowed, which is available today for Premium Edition owners. Avowed will support DLSS, Frame Generation, and Reflex, but it’s not launching with native DLSS 4 support. You can use the Nvidia app to force Avowed to use DLSS 4, though.
Nvidia has also addressed some bugs with its latest drivers, including fixing Valorant crashes on RTX 50-series, the Final Fantasy XVI freezing problems, and Delta Force performance issues on some systems.
Crytek is laying off around 15 percent of its 400 employees, affecting development teams and shared services. The announcement comes months after Crytek put the development of its next Crysis game “on hold” in Q3, 2024.
“Like so many of our peers, we aren’t immune to the complex, unfavorable market dynamics that have hit our industry these past several years,” says Crytek in a statement. “It pains us greatly to share today that we must lay off an estimated 15 percent of our around 400 employees.”
Crytek has been shifting developers over to Hunt: Showdown 1896, its multiplayer extraction shooter. “While Hunt: Showdown 1896 is still growing, Crytek cannot continue as before and remain financially sustainable,” says Crytek. “We firmly believe in the future of Crytek. With Hunt: Showdown 1896, we have a very strong gaming service and remain fully committed to its operation.“
Crysis 4 was originally announced three years ago with a teaser trailer, when the game was in the early stages of development. Crytek now appears to be focused primarily on its live service game, instead of the single player Crysis franchise that created the “But can it run Crysis?” meme that mocked the original game’s hardware requirements.
The power connector on Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs.
Ah shit, here we go again. Two owners of Nvidia’s new RTX 5090 Founders Edition GPUs have reported melted power connectors and damage to their PSUs. The images look identical to reports of RTX 4090 power cables burning or melting from two years ago. Nvidia blamed the issue on people not properly plugging the 12VHPWR power connection in fully and the PCI standards body blamed Nvidia.
A Reddit poster upgraded from an RTX 4090 to an RTX 5090 and noticed “a burning smell playing Battlefield 5,” before turning off their PC and finding the damage. The images show burnt plastic at both the PSU end of the power connector and the part that connects directly to the GPU. The cable is one from MODDIY, a popular manufacturer of custom cables, and the poster claims it was “securely fastened and clicked on both sides (GPU and PSU).”
While it’s tempting to blame the MODDIY cable, Spanish YouTuber Toro Tocho has experienced the same burnt cable (both at the GPU and PSU ends) with an RTX 5090 Founders Edition while using a cable supplied by PSU manufacturer FSP. Plastic has also melted into the PCIe 5.0 power connector on the power supply.
Nvidia originally introduced the 12VHPWR power connector on its RTX 40-series GPUs, and power supplies also debuted to support the new standard. The RTX 4090 Founders Edition was able to draw 450 watts over the 12VHPWR connector, while the new RTX 5090 draws up to 575 watts over a cable that’s rated up to 600 watts. After early issues with RTX 4090 connectors melting, PCI-SIG, the standards organization responsible for the 12VHPWR connector, has now updated it to a new 12V-2×6 connector on the GPU side and in some cases the PSU side, too.
The 12V-2×6 connector has shorter sensing pins and longer conductor terminals, to improve reliability. “This might not sound like a huge difference, but it matters in ensuring that the power cable has been properly connected to whatever device is going to be pulling power from your system’s power supply,” explains Corsair.
Nvidia uses the 12V-2×6 connector on its RTX 50-series GPUs, but you can still use existing 12VHPWR cables. “To be clear, this is not a new cable, it is an updated change to the pins in the socket, which is referred to as 12V-2×6,” says Corsair. PSU manufacturers like Corsair and MSI have adopted colored pins on their 12VHPWR cables so that if you can still see the yellow or grey pins it means the connector isn’t seated properly.
While Intel and AMD are both members of the PCI-SIG group that helped develop the 12VHPWR power connector, only Nvidia has adopted the standard so far. Even AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX 9070-series are using existing 8-pin PCIe connections instead. AMD even suggested the 12VHPWR connector was a fire hazard in late 2022, when the company’s gaming marketing director Sasa Marinkovic tweeted “Stay safe this holiday season” alongside a picture of 8-pin connectors.
12VHPWR has been branded a “dumpster fire,” thanks to design oversights that make it relatively easy for end users to not properly connect the cable securely. Cablemod was also forced to recall its 12VHPWR GPU power adapters last year after reports of melted adapters.
We’ve reached out to Nvidia to comment on these latest reports of RTX 5090 power connector issues, but the company did not respond in time for publication.
Microsoft has started rolling out a new scareware blocker in its Edge browser this week. The AI-powered feature runs on Windows PCs and can identify and block existing scams, and even detect new and emerging ones thanks to a local machine learning model.
“Scareware blocker adds a new, first line of defense to help protect the users exposed to a new scam if it attempts to open a full screen page. Scareware blocker uses a machine learning model that runs on the local computer,” explains the Microsoft Edge team in a blog post. “The model uses computer vision to compare full screen pages to thousands of sample scams that the scam-fighting community shared with us. The model runs locally, without saving or sending images to the cloud.”
Once a scam has been detected, Microsoft Edge will automatically exit the full screen mode that malicious sites try to enforce, stop audio playback, and then warn you with a thumbnail of the page you were viewing. You can then report the site so it’s added to Microsoft’s Defender SmartScreen service that automatically blocks Edge users from visiting known scam sites.
Announced originally at Ignite in November, the scareware blocker in Microsoft Edge is now available in preview in the latest stable channel release of the browser. You’ll need to enable the scareware blocker manually in Edge’s privacy settings, and then restart the browser to get the preview feature.
Meta is shutting down its Workplace platform next year, but Microsoft is planning to keep the dream of Facebook at work very much alive. Multiple sources at Microsoft tell me the company has started testing a fully integrated Facebook-like feed inside Microsoft Teams recently.
Teams users will be able to post to the feed, known as a Storyline, or reply to colleaguesâ posts much like you would on Facebook. Microsoft is pitching this as a way for colleagues to share announcements, news, or progress on a project. It could also be used to congratulate colleagues on work goals or key milestones. I’d expect, in many cases, this will also be used to share the type of content youâd typically find on LinkedIn.
Microsoft isnât using LinkedIn to power this new feature, though. Storyline in Teams is built on top of Viva Engage, the Yammer replacement that Microsoft launched a few years ago. Viva Engage was already available inside Teams, but it was hidden away in a separate tab. Microsoft is now taking the Storyline feature of Viva Engage and integrating it deeply into the main interface of Teams.
The main button in Microsoft Teams that you use to send a new DM or create a new channe …
Microsoft Build is once again being held in Seattle this year, just over the lake from Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The developer conference will start on May 19th and run through May 22nd at the Seattle Convention Center.
Microsoft hasn’t provided any hints about what the company plans to launch at Build, but it’s safe to say the conference will be full of AI announcements. Last year’s Build included Microsoft’s AI agents announcement, an AI-powered Windows clipboard PowerToy, and a tiny Snapdragon PC.
I’m also expecting a lot of announcements for Copilot at Build, whether it’s the consumer version or the Microsoft 365 Copilot that businesses pay for. Microsoft recently relaunched Copilot for businesses with free AI chat and pay-as-you-go agents, and it’s certainly not done trying to convince businesses that AI agents are the future. Microsoft also started bundling Office AI features into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions recently, and I’m expecting to hear more about Microsoft’s Office and Windows AI ambitions at Build this year.
Microsoft is getting ready to remove the VPN feature from its Microsoft 365 subscription later this month. Originally designed as a privacy feature, the VPN in Microsoft 365 utilizes the Microsoft Defender app to encrypt internet traffic and hide IP addresses. Microsoft is now removing this privacy protection feature from Microsoft 365 on February 28th.
“We routinely evaluate the usage and effectiveness of our features. As such, we are removing the privacy protection feature and will invest in new areas that will better align to customer needs,” says Microsoft in a support note spotted by Windows Central.
Microsoft 365 subscribers will still get access to identity theft and credit monitoring in the US, but they’ll have to look elsewhere for VPN support. It’s clear that a lack of people using the privacy protection feature has led to Microsoft removing it, but the VPN in Microsoft 365 was never fully featured enough to be used widely. Microsoft restricted you to a 50GB monthly data limit, and the VPN automatically connected to a local region making it impossible to work around the geo restrictions people often use VPNs for.
The removal of the VPN benefit in Microsoft 365 comes just weeks after Microsoft raised subscription prices for the first time in 12 years. Microsoft has bundled Office AI features into Microsoft 365 and hiked prices by an extra $3 month, but you can downgrade to a classic plan that maintains the existing price for Personal or Family subscriptions without the added AI features.
