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Does Microsoft Copilot live up to its Super Bowl ad?
February 26, 2024

Tech Brew

It’s Monday. Tech Brew’s Patrick Kulp got his hands on a test subscription to Microsoft’s new AI Copilot and decided to put it to the test, pitting it up against the Big Tech giant’s flashy one-minute Super Bowl ad.

In today’s edition:

Patrick Kulp, Kelcee Griffis, Annie Saunders

AI

Did AI do that?

Microsoft and Copilot logos Francis Scialabba

In life, there will be people who tell you that you can’t do things like open a business or get a degree. But with Microsoft’s AI helper here to design your logos and quiz you in chemistry, you can now tell those people, “Watch me.”

At least that’s the premise of the Microsoft Copilot ad that aired in front of over a hundred million viewers during this year’s Super Bowl. The minute-long commercial backs up its claims with a montage of rapid-fire examples in which users tap it to move their dreams forward—presumably making their doubting haters seethe.

But can Microsoft’s new AI Copilot actually perform the tasks as they were demonstrated on television screens across America? Armed with a test subscription to the service, Tech Brew attempted to find out.

Keep reading here.PK

     

FROM THE CREW

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CONNECTIVITY

Reality check

Close up of child using a tablet. Christopher Hopefitch/Getty Images

Many lawmakers, policy experts, and parents seem to agree: Social media platforms aren’t doing enough to keep children and teens safe online. Platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok continue to serve problematic content to their youngest users while proposed online safety legislation remains stalled in the halls of Congress.

In the meantime, some internet service providers are taking matters into their own hands. For example: Brian DeMarco, GM of Siyeh Communications, which is owned by the Blackfeet Nation in northwest Montana, started pairing content-monitoring service Bark with his company’s other connectivity offerings.

  • “We really want to bring more awareness to our parents and to community members on the reservation,” DeMarco told Tech Brew. “The internet is a very good thing. It’s a very powerful thing. But in some cases, it can be a very dangerous thing.”

Bark works on the household and device level, running content from specific apps that comes across the household’s router through machine-learning algorithms that include contextual analysis. This means Bark can alert parents when their child encounters potentially risky content. Cloud services provider Calix said it now offers integrated access to Bark to a thousand ISPs.

DeMarco said the service has already reaped results locally: He recounted a conversation with a parent in a local school who said her nephew had been experiencing suicidal ideation. Bark alerted the child’s father to the related content he’d engaged with, which led to a productive dialogue.

Keep reading here.KG

     

COMMUNITY

Coworking with Will LaForest

Graphic featuring a headshot of Will LaForest Will LaForest

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

Ever notice how the customer experience across every industry is evolving to be more frictionless, integrated, and immediate? For example, when you need to catch a ride somewhere, rideshare services allow you to know exactly where your car is at all times, and when you are done, you just step out to your destination. Don’t want to make a trip to the grocery store? Shop on your phone, watch shoppers collect the right items, and have it delivered to your doorstep.

These experiences are made possible by continuously acting on streams of data as they are created. Every customer action, car movement, inventory change, order, payment are all data streams of events. My job is to partner with customers across the globe in all industries to help them with the transformation of using real-time data. I guide them on how to use data streaming for their business, and they help me understand how our technology can evolve to better support them.

What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?

As our lives have become more connected and dependent on technology, our risk from cybercriminals and state-sponsored cyberterrorists accelerates. For example, some automobiles can now be started and even controlled from a mobile app. This is super cool, but has introduced a new way in which our lives can be impacted by bad actors. Data streaming is ubiquitous in the fight against these threats. I’ve been working on an open-source project that helps organizations look for threat patterns and anomalies in real-time streams of data. This project leverages the open standard Sigma so that it can easily be used in conjunction with any cybersecurity technology as well as enabling organizations to freely share and distribute threat detection patterns. It feels great to contribute to projects like this, which make people a little safer.

What technologies are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

While this might seem pretty mundane, I’m very optimistic about open-source data management technologies. Open-source itself completely changed the trajectory of digital innovation because it allowed people to experiment with ideas at a low cost and avoid being locked into a single expensive vendor. This greatly accelerated the rate at which our day-to-day lives have been transformed by software.

Keep reading here.

     

TOGETHER WITH MILLENNIUM

Millennium

Calling all innovators . Technologists at Millennium partner across the organization to build solutions that drive impact and help make the business faster + more resilient. Ready to contribute to a team that fuels innovation on a global scale? Check out Millennium’s open roles to get started.

BITS AND BYTES

Stat: 10%. That’s the maximum recycling rate for plastics in the US, Grist reported, noting that the rate today hovers around 5%–6%.

Quote: “Tears welled up in my goggles, pooling at the soft rim of the face cushion. These tears never made their way down my cheek. I was literally crying on the inside. When I plucked the Vision Pro off my face, I saw that the face computer’s seal was soaked.”—Lauren Goode, a senior writer at Wired, in an essay about watching sad movies while wearing an Apple Vision Pro

Read: Google pauses AI-made images of people after race inaccuracies (Bloomberg)

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