Real-time tracking and notifications of spending on Microsoft Azure broken, Twitter API no longer free to access and Microsoft Teams injects AI into its service.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Friday, February 3rd and I am your host, Ashee Pamma
Microsoft announced that real-time tracking and notifications of partners’ Azure spend is broken until-March, sparking the possibility that spending overruns will go undetected. Azure Savings Plans promise to deliver lower prices if customers sign up to spend a fixed hourly amount on compute devices for one or three years. If they exceed the hours, additional use is billed at pay-as-you-go prices and invoiced separately. Information about customers who exceed their planned spend will still be recorded – but partners won’t get regular notifications about what their customers are doing with Azure. Microsoft has blamed “technical problems with their internal processing system” for the issue.
Source: The Register
Twitter announced that starting February 9, the Twitter API will no longer be free to access. This comes as a disappointment to a wide range of developers whose research, bots and apps depend on free access to the platform’s API to function. Now they will have to either pay to access public data or abruptly shut down their projects. Twitter has not yet shared how much its new “paid basic tier” will cost, but the company promised more details to come next week. Developers and popular commentators have protested the announcement, particularly the short notice, the lack of information on pricing and their potential loss of valuable content.
Source: Ars Technica
Microsoft Teams will offer new features powered by GPT-3.5. By injecting AI into its service, Microsoft seeks to help organizations re-energize employees to achieve business results. From automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks to personalized highlights, the AI-generated action items seek to help organizations looking to optimize IT investments and boost employee productivity. Now generally available, the incorporation of AI in Teams is aided by OpenAI in which Microsoft has invested $10 billion.
Source: The Register
As companies look to trim their technology spending, after they ramped up investment and efforts to enable remote work during the pandemic, the demand for cloud remains a question mark. Companies are coming to Amazon Web Services, a market leader in cloud computing services to ask for help cutting their bills, reported Data Center Knowledge. Microsoft, Amazon’s rival in cloud services, alarmed investors last week when it forecast slower growth for its own cloud operations. Analysts expect AWS’s sales to grow by 22% in the fourth quarter,and slow through 2023.
Source: Data Center Knowledge
AI has been generating an endless Seinfeld episode for more than a month on Twitch under the name Nothing, Forever. The episode was launched on December 14th 2022 and has been broadcasting since. Vice wrote that the episode features low poly versions of the show’s characters hanging out in a slightly reconfigured version of Jerry’s sitcom apartment, talking in robotic sentences. Sometimes there is an exterior shot of the apartment, with Jerry performing stand up. It also has a laugh track along lots of not-funny lines of GPT-3 generated dialogue. The creator explained to Vice that the concept came from “this weird, very off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project” that was further developed using “machine learning, generative algorithms, and cloud services” over the years.
Source: AV Club
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Ashee Pamma.
