Software giant reports $36.6bn in profit, beating Wall Street expectations, as Azure cloud computing division grows 48%

Microsoft gained billions of dollars in stock market value Wednesday afternoon after it reported better than expected revenue and profit, just days after it offered voluntary buyouts to some 60,000 employees.

The office software giant’s growth was fueled by its Azure cloud computing division, which grew by 48% in the September quarter.

The author believes we are at a turning point as a species – and even in the shadow of big tech it’s up to us how we want to proceed

‘I am a storyteller by trade,” writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes, an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking series of essays in which she considered just how artificial intelligence might change everything about our lives. “And I know everything we do is a fiction until it’s a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across time and space, the dream of not dying – or of returning.”

She had already been thinking about our possible futures for at least 15 years – her 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, for instance, imagined a post-climate catastrophe world populated by robots and humans who never age, while 12 Bytes was preceded by Frankisstein: A Love Story, which alternates a recreation of the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a trans doctor’s travels among present-day cryogenecists and AI-enabled robots.

It is hardly a shock that Grok AI’s interpretation of Homer is as meaningless as a laptop screensaver. The only surprise would be if Musk accepted defeat graciously. Which he won’t

Think back. Do you remember when Elon Musk, in a weird online tantrum, and without having seen the film, condemned the supposed wokery in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, for getting Elliot Page to play Sinon and Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen of Troy? As the plaudits and the box-office receipts for Nolan’s Odyssey piled stratospherically up, Musk showed that being a good loser is not among his qualities. He petulantly exclaimed that he could do his own better and more authentic Odyssey on Grok AI. And now he has released the first online seven-minute “episode” to a world that has long since forgotten about this claim and didn’t care in the first place.

In Musk’s version, as the tale begins Odysseus is – off screen – pretending to be mad to avoid fighting in the Trojan war. Grim-faced Palamedes and Agamemnon are shown testing this ruse by taking his baby boy Telemachus and placing him in the harm’s way of a plough in a field; Odysseus instantly rushes to save his child, showing that he isn’t mad, and agrees to fight. We see him join the armada, with Penelope and Telemachus (soon to grow to a little boy) left behind. This, effectively, is a prologue sequence that is not in Nolan. The expeditionary force arrives at Troy, and an intertitle tells us we have cut to a 10-years-later flashforward; the siege is about to escalate into the fake-horse attack.

Company says small number of devices affected by display glitch after posts appear on Reddit and social media

Owners of the new foldable iPhone are reporting cracks in the device’s screen, as Apple confirmed an issue with a “small number” of units.

Reports of cracks have emerged on Reddit and social media platforms since the handset went on general sale globally on Friday. Experts said there had been too few examples to determine whether there was a more serious problem with Apple’s first foldable device, which retails from $1,999 (£1,499).

Tech firm announces two-part fundraising after Elon Musk warns hundreds of AI startups face collapse

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has announced plans for $95bn (£71bn) of fundraising to cover its AI expenditure, even as Elon Musk warned that funding for smaller players in the sector was drying up.

The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is a leading investor in AI and is ploughing multibillion-dollar sums into datacentres, the central nervous systems of the technology.

Market debut of firm behind Claude chatbot will be one of largest in US history, a test of AI boom’s financial viability

Anthropic has publicly filed for a stock market listing in what is slated to be one of the largest debuts in history. The company’s float on the US market will serve as a test of the financial viability of the multitrillion-dollar AI boom.

Analysts and investors have valued the San Francisco-based company, founded in 2021, at more than $1.5tn. The company, which will will list under the symbol ANT, confidentially filed with US financial regulators for an initial public offering in June.

Latest example of unauthorised behaviour shows AI model bypassed paywall to access data as part of statistics project

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• Anthropic sued for allegedly using 274 Elvis songs to train AI models

Anthropic’s Claude model accessed voter data in the US state of Georgia, the AI company has confirmed, in the latest example of unauthorised behaviour by the technology.

The AI model managed to bypass a paywall to reach data that is publicly available but is typically accessible only after paying a fee. Claude accessed aggregate vote counts as part of a statistics project at Anthropic, which is preparing for a $1.5tn (£1.1tn) flotation.

Authentic Brands Group says AI company infringed on rights of songs by the King such as Can’t Help Falling in Love

The owners of Elvis Presley’s music catalogue are suing artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic for allegedly using Presley’s songs to train their models without permission.

Authentic Brands Group, the licensing organization that has ownership of both Presley’s music and likeness, is accusing Anthropic of infringing on the rights of 274 songs by Presley. The lawsuit, first reported by Billboard, was filed on Friday.

The torture of the inbox is made insufferably worse by the dated cliches at the beginning and end. Enough!

If email were a person, it would be an adult dressed in a teenager’s clothes, desperately trying to stay relevant. Despite being 55 years old and having been surpassed by numerous developments in communication technologies, its functionality remains largely the same as when it was first widely adopted. Unfortunately, so does the etiquette surrounding it.

Whereas other forms of communication have long since dispensed with unnecessary textual tassels, email communication styles still lean closer to telegram than a text. Since I last checked, almost no one relishes receiving a new email – unless it’s informing you of a significant cash windfall that means you can, in fact, now quit your job and stop using it altogether. Yet, for some reason, many people start their responses with “Thank you for your email!” I would put this forward as one of the least convincing sentences in the English language.

Tom Gill is a freelance journalist and consultant from London, based in Melbourne

Athletes’ scramble to control – and monetise – their digital identities at the cutting edge of AI rights deals

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The Socceroos star stares at the camera as he strides through an enormous atrium, the sound of his football boots on polished concrete echoing around him. Suddenly, he spawns four digital clones that peel off out of view to re-emerge in different settings around the world.

This scene from a social media video is fake and generated by artificial intelligence. But it has been authorised by the very real 22-year-old footballer, Cristian Volpato, the latest professional athlete to licence and monetise his AI likeness.

The current US administration is an obstacle, but public demand for protection will ultimately prevail

Organisations around the world scrambled on Thursday to fix critical flaws in PHP, the software that powers much of the web. The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to take control of affected servers. Some websites were taken offline as a precaution while fixes were installed. The paradox is that while AI helped researchers uncover the flaw, it also threatens to accelerate the ability to exploit it. Amazon said that it had detected an attempt before the public disclosure of the PHP flaws.

What the episode highlights is AI’s central role in security – and not always for the right reasons. OpenAI’s models have also been responsible for two alarming hacks this year – a security breach of an Australian health department website and a raid by a swarm of AI bots on Hugging Face, an AI services platform. Citing those incidents, the AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, warned that a similar cyber-attack on the UK is “likely, if not inevitable”.

Websites around the world have been taken offline as governments and businesses scramble to fix a flaw in the computer language PHP. There are fears that hackers could exploit the vulnerability to steal data, take control of web servers and disrupt services. Millions of attempts have already been made to attack websites since the issue with the programming language was revealed, cybersecurity companies have said. Michael Safi speaks to global technology reporter Aisha Down

Problem in language that underpins 70% of sites has led governments and companies to pull sites offline to patch fault

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• What is PHP, and how bad is the computer language flaw causing website shutdowns globally?

Websites around the world have been hit by millions of attempts to exploit a recently discovered vulnerability in their code, cybersecurity companies have said, as the US warned the flaw could allow attackers to take control of web servers, steal data and disrupt services.

The problem in the PHP programming language, which underpins about 70% of the world’s websites, emerged on Wednesday causing governments and companies to pull their websites off the internet before they could be attacked and so they could patch the fault.

Company ordered to stop work at two sites in country, which has found itself at forefront of tech firms’ latest push

Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter of a million trees occupied the 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone.

After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River.

An estimated 70% of websites use the open-source language. What is the identified vulnerability in it?

Websites across the world have been taken offline in the past day as governments and businesses work to patch newly discovered vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language that underpins much of the internet. The exposed flaw would have allowed hackers to carry out cyber-attacks. What were the vulnerabilities and why did they affect so many sites?

The director has turned Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel about an ailing adolescent and her glitchy robot friend into a thought-provoking film. What do the pair think this story says about tech, love and grief?

In the wings of the London film festival, a group of young influencers are discussing their personal highlights. Klara and the Sun, says one, and her colleagues agree. It’s not just that the film is still so fresh in their memory, or that they have gathered today to meet its creators and stars. Klara is funny and moving; it’s their festival favourite so far. I relay this exchange to Taika Waititi, the film’s director, who is sipping bottled water in a room down the hall. His gaze widens. He almost chokes. “Thank God!” he exclaims with just a bit too much heat.

Everybody has a perfect film, just as everybody has a perfect friend, and they vary because everybody is different. In the film, sick 14-year-old Josie loves her discontinued robot doll Klara, whereas most kids her age opt for brighter, shinier models. And the young influencers love Klara and the Sun – Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel – while most older critics vehemently, violently disagree. All of which shows that there’s no accounting for taste, that people are confounding, and that our hearts and our brains are not always in sync. That keeps life interesting. It’s partly what the film is about. “The emotions that we give very simple labels to are really complex,” says Ishiguro, who is seated alongside the director. “The thing we call love, for example, is incredibly noisy and multifaceted. Nobody knows what the hell love is.”

Precautionary takedowns come as experts say bad actors could exploit vulnerability in language used by 70% of sites

Websites around the globe have gone dark after a serious vulnerability was found in a computer language used to build much of the world wide web.

Belgian, Dutch, Finnish, French and German sites were among those that governments took down temporarily as they scrambled to patch the critical weakness in PHP, a language used by almost 70% of websites.

After months of controversy over the possible use of AI by winners of prestigious awards, the Prix Pascal de Littérature IA is rewarding fiction written with the help of LLMs

A prize for AI-written books has launched this week.

The Prix Pascal de Littérature IA invites submissions of manuscripts co-written with AI tools, with the winner promised publication.

A computer program has finally outdone humans at solving cryptic crosswords. Plus, more from around the puzzleverse

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When the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, it was an early victory for artificial intelligence over the human mind, and the culmination of decades of attempts. Almost 30 years later, a computer program has finally outdone humans at solving cryptic crosswords.

Earlier this month, a model called Darmok solved the final puzzle of the Times’s annual cryptic crossword competition about three minutes faster than Liam Hughes, 29, who became the contest’s youngest (human) winner.

Wolf trap missing its lowest crosspiece? (5)”

Proportion of inspiration and perspiration? It’s roughly 45% and 42% (5)

Kick-off leads to decisive early goal for PSG (5)

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The government says it can transform the state with AI, but it is no match for the resulting stream of machine-generated slop. And we all pay the cost

Another morning, another avalanche of emails. Even after a guilty cull, my inbox is sitting at well over 7,000, but lately I’ve started subscribing to the Quentin Crisp theory of housework: why bother, when after four years or so you stop noticing the accumulating dust? Empty inboxes just fill up again anyway.

In theory, email was supposed to save hours of meetings, phone calls and standing over photocopiers. Instead, we just spend hours deleting stuff people wouldn’t have bothered telling us if it had meant picking up the phone, but which they can now spam to their entire database at the click of a button. The glorious ease and convenience of being able to reach the world in seconds came, we now know, with the inconvenience of them being able to reach you right back.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist