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Microsoft is said to be entering another player into the AI model market, with its newest iteration titled ‘Mai-1,’ and reports suggest it could be better than the rest.
Although the technology giant has already invested over $10 billion into OpenAI, the company is said to be training a new in-house AI model that can compete.
The news comes from The Information who say the development of the large language model is being led by Mustafa Suleyman, the former Google AI leader who served as the CEO of the AI startup Inflection.
Inflection is a California-based company that creates conversational AI that you can talk to. Its team created the personal AI called Pi which was released in May 2023. Microsoft was one of its investors in a $1.3 billion funding round.
Both Suleyman and the other co-founder of Inflection, Karén Simonyan, were poached by Microsoft in March 2024. Other members of the team joined the duo at Microsoft too.
MAI-1 is expected to be created solely by Microsoft and is separate from Inflection, but it could build on training data and other technology as they paid for the start-up’s rights to its intellectual property for the sum of $650 million in March.
What we know about Microsoft’s MAI-1
Aside from this report, there hasn’t been any confirmation or news about MAI-1 officially published.
The rumor suggests it could have roughly 500 billion parameters, meaning MAI-1 will be significantly larger than Microsoft’s previous open-source models like Phi-3.
OpenAI’s GPT-4 is rumored to have over 1 trillion parameters and the French AI tool Mistral is thought to be at 70 billion parameter models. Microsoft and Mistral signed a multi-year partnership in February.
While start-ups are finding their feet and making waves in AI like Anthropic and xAI, Microsoft is a massive company that should have the huge amounts of data needed to train the MAI-1 model.
Microsoft has been allocating a large cluster of servers with Nvidia GPUs and compiling training data from various sources for MAI-1, according to the source. This includes text generated from OpenAI’s GPT-4, alongside public internet data.
The Information further reports how a preview of MAI-1 could come as early as the Microsoft Build conference later this month (May 23 – 25) if progress is made within development.
Featured Image: Via Ideogram
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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is continuing its investigations into cryptocurrency exchanges, with the potential to sue Robinhood Markets.
The SEC, in its role as an agency responsible for regulating the securities markets and protecting investors, could sue US-based Robinhood Markets over securities violations alleged in the popular crypto app. In a recent SEC filing dated May 4, Robinhood Markets Chief Financial Officer Jason Warnick confirmed that Robinhood Crypto has received investigative subpoenas from the SEC regarding its “cryptocurrency listings, custody of cryptocurrencies, and platform operations.”
This comes after months of investigations into suspected security violations, which Robinhood has thus far cooperated with. However, according to the filing, the SEC sent a Wells Notice on Monday, May 6, which told the crypto app that the agency had made a “preliminary determination” and recommended that an enforcement action should be filed stating that Robinhood Crypto had violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
What does the SEC filing mean?
If an enforcement action is filed, then the next steps could lead to a civil injunctive action, public administrative proceeding, and/or a cease-and-desist proceeding, according to the filing.
Robinhood publicly responded to the SEC filing via a statement from Dan Gallagher, the app’s chief legal, compliance, and corporate affairs officer, on May 6, writing that he was “disappointed”.
“We firmly believe that the assets listed on our platform are not securities and we look forward to engaging with the SEC to make clear just how weak any case against Robinhood Crypto would be on both the facts and the law,” he stated.
Last June, Gallagher testified to Congress that 18 months’ worth of talks with the SEC did not help Robinhood understand how to properly register its crypto trading business. While the company maintains that no security violations have taken place, it described the situation as a “world of confusion around crypto” on its website in December 2023.
Featured image: Unsplash
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The Swedish government has proposed discontinuing the Casino Cosmopol gambling business from state-owned operator Svenska Spel.
On May 7, the Swedish government stated that the casino business “no longer fulfils its purpose,” noting on going challenges preventing Casino Cosmopol from reaching profitability. This includes the closure of two sites at the end of 2023 and ongoing regulatory issues.
As such, the government plans to shut down the business. It maintains that it does not expect the proposed closure to have a “major impact” on illegal gambling in Sweden. If the closure does go through, however, the license for Svenska Spel to operate land-based casinos would be revoked and it would need to shut down its last casino venue before January 1, 2026. This is expected to impact around 200 jobs.
Svenska Spel responds to the proposed closure of Casino Cosmopol
Spokespeople for Svenska Spel have publicly stated that they echo the government’s assessment. In the past, it operated four locations, the first of which closed in 2020, followed by those in Gothenburg and Malmö last year.
“The movement from gambling in land-based casinos to gambling online accelerated after the reregulation of the gambling market in 2019 and the subsequent pandemic, when Casino Cosmopol remained closed,” Svenska Spel CEO Erik Strand said.
“Our review of Casino Cosmopol has taken place in close dialogue with our owner. We share the assessment that it is no longer possible to run Casino Cosmopol profitably.”
Fellow CEO Ola Enquist also made a statement accepting the news but also described the move as an “end of an era”.
“Although we share the government’s assessment, it is emotional to take part in the bill,” Enquist said. “If it is adopted, it means that our last casino is closing and that an era is over.”
“This of course affects all of us who work at Casino Cosmopol. As an employer, we will do everything we can to support our employees. We will also stay open as usual and continue to take care of our guests.”
Featured image: Per-Olof Forsberg on Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0 DEED
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The President of Nintendo has confirmed the announcement of the Switch 2 will be “within this fiscal year,” as speculation continues.
On Tuesday (May 7) Shuntaro Furukawa took to the Nintendo Co Ltd X account to share the news that many fans will be excited about.
As the rumor mill has been going into overdrive lately, with many trying to guess what the ‘Switch 2’ will look like and when we’ll be able to get our hands on it, the official confirmation of the successor’s entry into the market is welcomed.
The post read: “This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will announce the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year.
“It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015.
“We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.”

This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We will be holding a Nintendo Direct…
— 任天堂株式会社（企業広報・IR） (@NintendoCoLtd) May 7, 2024

What we can expect from the Nintendo Switch 2
While speculation around the console has been intense, the announcement from Nintendo today is the only confirmation that reveals details for Switch fans.
So we now know more will be released about the Switch 2 between now and the beginning of April 2025, with Nintendo setting expectations for those who are excited.
As for the changes that we could see, a recent report suggests the slide-on Joy-Cons may become magnetic on the newest variant of the Nintendo device. This hasn’t been confirmed and there has been no indication of this from the developer, but a Spanish-language gaming news site reported the rumor after hearing from manufacturers.
Another rumor, by the Taiwanese Economic Forum, suggests the Nintendo Switch 2 could be bigger than the original but with a RAM of just 8GB and 64GB of onboard storage.
The Taiwanese Economic Forum also wrote that the release will feature a price hike due to the “pressure of global inflation and the weak yet,” with an expectation of this being around $400.
Featured Image: Photo by Magnus Engø on Unsplash
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As certain parts of the USA move into peak hurricane season Sublime plans to release its storm chasing PC game OUTBRK: Storm Chasing Simulator to coincide with the windy weather.
Set in a fictional representation of America’s Tornado Alley you will take on the role of a professional Storm Chaser – one of the mad crew of danger-seekers who drive into the eye of hurricanes in armored cars like something from Mad Max in order to create valuable weather data to help future prediction software.
Hurricanes are deadly at the best of times that can leave people dead so gamifying it is a tricky business, but we have had storm-chasing games before on the PC but they never quite managed to pull off the adrenaline rush of the job.
For full disclosure, I used to be an avid watcher of the TV show Storm Chasers so perhaps know more than most about this crazy line of work, as any kind of mad science has always fascinated me so I am keen to see how this all pans out.
OUTBRK features a 625 square kilometers map with various landmarks such as rivers, canyons, plains, towns, and forests. It will be multiplayer with you competing against other storm chasers to get the best data and the biggest rewards.
The devs originally took to Kickstarter like other games we have recently covered such as Starship Simulator, and ran a successful campaign to get the game funded and true to their word, we are soon to see the fruits of their labors.

Sublime has just released a new video showing how some of the extreme weather systems will work in the game and boy do those clouds look moody. Check it out for yourself above.
OUTBRK: Storm Chasing Simulator will launch, without all its vowels in its title into Early Access on Steam on June 28th.
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