Commercial challenges, competition, legal actions. The big names in technology on the one hand they are struggling with the production of ever better computers, on the other they find themselves having to deal with the barriers imposed by the Antitrust which would like to provide greater competition, while they attack each other on a legal level.
Why Microsoft is unpacking Teams and Office
ecosystem, to try to avoid yet another fine on the part Antitrust, announced that it will now sell its products separately teams (its chat and video app) and the package Office on a global level, after 6 months ago it had to do so limited to Europe and Switzerland. The Redmond company, led by Satya Nadella, which in the last ten years has already had to pay 2,2 billion euros in EU antitrust fines for having combined or grouped two or more products together and now risks a fine of up to 10% of its global annual revenue if found guilty of antitrust.
La European Commission began investigating the sale of the combined Office and/Teams package following a 2020 complaint filed by a competing company. Teams, which was added to Office 365 for free in 2017, later replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic, in part thanks to its video conferencing. Rivals, however, believe that packaging products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. “To provide clarity to our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to separate Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “This also responds to feedback from the European Commission by providing multinationals with more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across different geographic areas.”
For new commercial customers, pricing for Office without Teams ranges from $7,75 to $54,75 depending on the product, while Teams Standalone will cost $5,25. But Microsoft's separation may not be enough to avoid EU antitrust charges that are likely to be leveled at the company in the coming months as rivals criticize the level of fees and capacity of their messaging services, sources spoke to Reuters. to work with Office web applications in your own services.
Microsoft and OpenAi launch the Stargate supercomputer
Meanwhile, the big names compete in the field of creation of increasingly high-performance computers, linked toArtificial intelligence. On the one hand, Microsoft itself allies itself with OperAi, on the other, Musk launches a new attack.
The new ultra-powerful supercomputer for artificial intelligence applications that will come out of the laboratories of ecosystem e OpenAI is called Stargate and it will cost something like 115 billion dollars and operation is expected by 2028. The collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI continues at a fast pace. The Redmond company acquired even greater "say" after the return of Sam altman leading the artificial intelligence solutions of OpenAI, the San Francisco company that created ChatGpt and essentially triggered a technological revolution.
La figure that the two have brought to the table is enormous. ecosystem would bear the expenses for the datacenter, which could be “100 times more expensive” than current standards. Stargate would be the largest of a series of data center projects that the two companies aim to build over the next 6 years. Creating a data center suitable to host Stargate represents a truly demanding challenge: current designs would require placing many more GPUs in a single rack than Microsoft is used to doing, with the precise aim of increasing the efficiency and performance of the chip. Obviously, such a configuration makes the requirements even more stringent in terms of heat dissipation. Stargate would be a supercomputer of "Phase 5", tuttavia by 2026 Microsoft and OpenAI could launch a “phase 4” system at a lower cost, despite requiring demanding power sources ("at least several gigawatts"). The two companies are evaluating alternatives such as the use ofnuclear energy.
Elon Musk's counterattack with Grok 2
Meanwhile Elon Musk announced the launch of Grok 2, the new version of the artificial intelligence model developed by his startup, xAI. “Grok 2 should exceed the current artificial intelligence on all parameters,” Musk wrote on the social network, specifying that the latest version of his startup's artificial intelligence model, Grok, will be distributed to X users starting next week. This update promises to outperform competitors, including OpenAI's GPT-4, Alphabet Inc.'s Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude 3, and Mistral Large. The startup delivered Grok open source, seeking funding and data to further improve the technology.
Musk had started a legal action accusing OpenAI of developing artificial intelligence that it should have improve life of all humanity and having sold it to Microsoft, betraying the initial mission, so now the most discussed entrepreneur in the tech world is launching his challenge for a more open artificial intelligence. Musk's accusation is that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman violated OpenAI's "founding agreement" drawn up with the contribution of Musk himself, which stated that the company would be committed to developing Artificial General Intelligence (Agi ) openly and “for the benefit of humanity”.
