Artificial Intelligence: News, Business, Science

Apr 3, 2026

Microsoft is investing $10 billion in Japan from 2026 to 2029, its largest ever commitment to the country. Vice Chairman and President Brad Smith presented the plans during a visit to Tokyo. The funding covers AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and workforce training.

Together with SoftBank and Sakura Internet, Microsoft plans to offer GPU-based AI services through Azure, with all data staying in Japan. This should make it possible to develop Japanese language models. On the security side, Microsoft is deepening its partnership with Japan's cybersecurity agency and the National Police to better detect and prevent cyberattacks.

Japan is projected to be short 3.26 million AI and robotics specialists by 2040, according to the Ministry of Economy. To address that, Microsoft is teaming up with Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, NTT Data, and SoftBank to train one million engineers and developers by 2030. Microsoft had already invested $2.9 billion in Japan in 2024.

Comment Source: Microsoft

Matthias Bastian

Apr 3, 2026

Short News

Anthropic has looked into complaints from users who were hitting their Claude Code usage limits much faster than expected. According to Anthropic's Lydia Hallie, tighter limits during peak hours and sessions with 1-million-token contexts growing larger are the two main reasons for the problem. Hallie says Anthropic also fixed some bugs, but none of them led to incorrect billing. The company has also shipped efficiency improvements and added in-product pop-ups to keep users informed.

Hallie recommends using Sonnet 4.6 instead of Opus, since Opus burns through limits roughly twice as fast. She also suggests turning off Extended Thinking when it's not needed, starting fresh sessions instead of continuing old ones, and limiting the context window. Users who still notice unusually high usage should report it through the feedback function.

Comment Source: Hallie via X

Matthias Bastian

Apr 3, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI is switching to usage-based pricing for Codex in ChatGPT Business and Enterprise. Admins can enable free Codex access across their workspace and pay only for actual usage; no upfront licenses required. Eligible Business customers can also claim up to 500 dollars in promotional credit per workspace as part of a limited-time promotion.

The move is designed to lower the barrier for enterprise adoption, OpenAI says. Coding tools typically spread from individual developers to full teams. "This model gives organizations a simpler way to support that motion inside a managed workspace," the company writes. OpenAI is likely betting that hands-on experience will drive long-term lock-in. It's a direct shot at GitHub Copilot and Cursor, which still charge per seat.

OpenAI says over two million developers use Codex weekly, with Business and Enterprise usage growing sixfold since January. The company's biggest competitor in this space is Anthropic with Claude Code.

Comment

Jonathan Kemper

Apr 3, 2026

AI in practice

Zhipu AI's GLM-5V-Turbo turns design mockups directly into executable front-end code

Chinese AI startup Zhipu AI has released GLM-5V-Turbo, a multimodal model that processes images, video, and text and is designed for use in agent workflows.

Read full article

Comment

Matthias Bastian

Apr 3, 2026

AI in practice

Claude Code and Cowork now let Anthropic's AI take control of your Mac or Windows desktop

Matthias Bastian

Apr 3, 2026

AI and society

OpenAI decides the best way to fight critical AI coverage is to own a newsroom

OpenAI has acquired tech talk show TBPN. The show will supposedly remain editorially independent but report to OpenAI’s communications department. That’s as contradictory as it sounds. So what’s OpenAI really after?

Read full article

Comment

Matthias Bastian

Apr 3, 2026

AI in practice

New Cursor 3 ditches the classic IDE layout for an "agent-first" interface built around parallel AI fleets

Matthias Bastian

Apr 2, 2026

AI in practice

Google's Gemma 4 is now available with Apache 2.0 licensing for the first time

Matthias Bastian

Apr 2, 2026

Short News

Japanese AI startup Sakana AI has unveiled "Sakana Marlin," its first product for business customers. The system works autonomously: give it a topic, and it researches on its own for up to eight hours, then delivers detailed reports and presentations. Sakana AI says the tool can produce professional strategy analyses that would normally take human teams several weeks.

Sample output from "Sakana Marlin": after autonomous research, the tool creates text reports and presentation slides on a given topic (here: AI trends in the financial sector). | Image: Sakana AI

Sakana Marlin combines the company's "AI Scientist," designed to resolve contradictions, with its previously introduced "AB-MCTS" method for strategic searches. Multiple AI models work together, and longer thinking time is meant to yield better results, the company says.

The company is looking for beta testers in finance, research, and business consulting. The beta is free, but requires registration (the form is in Japanese). The biggest weakness of automated reports like these is hard-to-spot AI errors, something the startup doesn't address in its announcement.

Comment Source: Sakana AI

Matthias Bastian

Apr 2, 2026

Short News

Microsoft has introduced MAI-Transcribe-1, a speech-to-text model supporting 25 languages that achieves the lowest word error rate of any model tested on the FLEURS benchmark, beating Scribe v2, Whisper-large-V3, GPT-Transcribe, and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. The model is also built to handle tough recording conditions like background noise, poor audio quality, and overlapping speech, Microsoft says.

MAI-Transcribe-1 (green) leads in word error rate on the FLEURS benchmark in most of the 25 languages tested, outperforming Scribe v2, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, Whisper-large-v3, and GPT-Transcribe. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is rolling out MAI-Transcribe-1 across Copilot Voice and Microsoft Teams. Developers can try it as a public preview through Microsoft Foundry and the Microsoft AI Playground. The model runs 2.5 times faster than Microsoft's previous Azure Fast offering and costs $0.36 per audio hour. Combined with MAI-Voice-1 and a language model, it can also power voice agents, Microsoft says.

Cohere and Mistral recently released open-source alternatives that perform at a similar level.

Comment Source: Microsoft