Seattle/New York:

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he is the “product of the bond” that exists between India and the US, as top government officials and American lawmakers lauded the Indian community’s contribution during Republic Day commemoration here.

The Consulate General of India in Seattle hosted a special reception on Sunday at the Bell Harbour Conference Centre to commemorate India’s 76th Republic Day.

Washington State Governor Bob Ferguson and Mr Nadella were the Guests of Honour at the reception attended by over 500 people from the Indian-American community, according to a press release issued by the Consulate. In a unique first, several members of the US Congress also joined the evening celebrations.

Mr Nadella, addressing the gathering, acknowledged that he “was a product of the bond that exists between the two countries (India and US).” He praised the leadership of both nations for their “focus on how to use technology to leverage education outcomes, health outcomes, public service efficiency, competitiveness and productivity of small businesses”, the press release said.

Addressing members of the Indian-American community at the Republic Day reception, Ferguson, the newly elected 24th Governor of Washington State, acknowledged “the incredible contribution the Indian society makes not just for India but for the entire world”.

He added that as a new Governor of the State of Washington, he looked forward to building on the relationship with the Consulate General of India in Seattle.

In a special recognition to mark the occasion, Washington State Senate in Olympia passed a State Senate Resolution, moved by State Senator Manka Dhingra and supported by Senator Vandana Slatter, welcoming the 76th Republic Day of India and the strong friendship between the people of India and the US.

The Republic Day reception, hosted by the Consul General of India in Seattle Prakash Gupta was also attended by a distinguished line-up of top government officials, lawmakers as well as Mayors of ten cities.

Several members of the US Congress who joined the evening celebrations included Rep. Suzan DelBene, Rep. Adam Smith, Rep. Michael Baumgartner, and Rep. Kim Schrier, who welcomed India’s achievements as the world’s largest democracy.  Other distinguished participants included Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, several Washington State Senators and Representatives.

The Republic Day reception in Seattle showcased several unique exhibits highlighting the cultural diversity of India, including ‘One District, One Product’ (ODOP) featuring one unique cultural heritage product from each state and union territory of India.

On the occasion, a photo exhibit ‘India through Tim’s Eyes’ was also organised that displayed some of India’s most iconic tourism sites photographed by ace photographer Tim Durkan during a visit to India in September last year.  The reception also featured a specially-curated dance performance showcasing various dance forms of Bharat titled ‘Natyam’, which was widely applauded by the gathering.

In another special gesture by Seattle city, several iconic buildings in Seattle, including the Seattle Great Wheel, Seattle Convention Center and Columbia Center were lit up in hues of the Indian tricolour to mark the Republic Day, the release added.

Earlier this month, Mr Nadella had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. “Thank you, PM @narendramodi ji for your leadership. Excited to build on our commitment to making India AI-first and work together on our continued expansion in the country to ensure every Indian benefits from this AI platform shift,” the Microsoft Chairman and CEO had said in a post on X about his meeting with PM Modi. 

PM Modi had voiced appreciation for Microsoft’s ambitious expansion and investment plans in India. “It was indeed a delight to meet you, @satyanadella! Glad to know about Microsoft’s ambitious expansion and investment plans in India. It was also wonderful discussing various aspects of tech, innovation and AI in our meeting,” PM Modi had said, responding to Mr Nadella’s post. 

Hyderabad:

Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy, accompanied by his Cabinet Ministers D Sridhar Babu, Uttam Kumar Reddy, among others, met Microsoft President Satya Nadella in Hyderabad.

Microsoft is one of the earliest technology companies in Hyderabad and has grown to a strength of 10,000 over the years.

It has also invested in a data centre capacity of 600 MW in the state.

Chief Minister Reddy thanked Mr Nadella for regular investments and the growth of Microsoft’s business in the city and state.

The Chief Minister and his IT Minister discussed various technology imperatives that the state is focusing on including AI, Gen AI, cloud, and sought Microsoft’s support to develop a strong ecosystem so that Hyderabad is seen as the leading city in the world in technology domain, the Chief Minister’s Office said in a statement Monday.

The Chief Minister also explained his plans for infrastructure development in the state including Regional Ring Road, radial roads, Future City, development of new manufacturing clusters, and how the government is proposing to create a vast pool of industry-ready talent through institutions like Young India Skills University.

As per a CMO post on X, Satya Nadella reiterated the commitment of Microsoft to partner with the state government in all its initiatives. He appreciated the Chief Minister’s vision of enhancing skills and improving infrastructure to the next level and opined that only these two can position Hyderabad in the Top 50 cities in the world for creating economic growth.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Microsoft Corp, which is struggling to bring data centers online fast enough to meet the demand for its artificial intelligence products, hired one of the engineering chiefs who kept Facebook’s infrastructure humming. 

Jay Parikh will join the senior leadership team and report to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive officer. 

“There are very few leaders in our industry with Jay’s experience in leading teams through the rapid growth and scale required to support today’s largest internet businesses,” Nadella said Thursday in an internal email, which the Redmond, Washington-based company also posted on its corporate blog. 

Parikh, who most recently ran cloud security startup Lacework, previously led engineering at Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc. Nadella said the company would share details on Parikh’s role in “the next few months.”

A Microsoft spokesperson didn’t immediately comment beyond the CEO’s note.

Parikh joined Facebook in 2009 and spent more than a decade there, working on technical infrastructure and data center projects that helped the company grow into the world’s largest social network. 

Meta broke ground on more than a dozen data centers around the world while Parikh was there. As many technology companies unplugged their own data centers in favor of rented computing power from Microsoft or Amazon.com Inc., Meta remained one of the few companies capable of building cutting-edge server farms at a massive scale. 

Parikh oversaw several other technical projects, including Meta’s efforts in subsea cables and its ill-fated Aquila drone project intended to beam wireless internet down to rural places in the US.

Microsoft, which operates subsea cable and data center design projects of its own, is increasingly focused on infrastructure projects that can help it wring greater power and efficiency from its network. Thanks largely to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Microsoft is at the forefront of the effort to build tools that rely on generative artificial intelligence. The company is racing to build data centers and chips to back that effort. 

On Wednesday, Microsoft forecast slower growth in its critical Azure cloud business as the company struggles to get data centers up and running fast enough to meet demand. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

San Francisco:

US cybersecurity agency CISA has issued a warning that hackers are trying to take advantage of Microsoft outage for phishing and other malicious activity.

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said today that they are “working” to safely bring systems back online globally.

The US cybersecurity agency warned individuals to “avoid clicking on phishing emails or suspicious links,” which can lead to email compromise and other scams.

“Threat actors continue to use the widespread IT outage for phishing and other malicious activity. CISA urges organisations to ensure they have robust cybersecurity measures to protect their users, assets, and data against this activity,” it said in a statement

The Microsoft outage has impacted Windows 10 and later systems, and is due to the “CrowdStrike Falcon content update and not to malicious cyber activity”.

Satya Nadella said in a post on X that “We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”

Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) July 19, 2024

A fresh Microsoft statement read that they are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.

According to CrowdStrike, the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:

Tech honchos Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, and others hailed India’s historic win over South Africa in a nerve-wrenching final of the ICC T20 World Cup at the Kensington Oval in Barbados on Saturday.

Alphabet and Google CEO Pichai posted on X: “What a game, could barely breathe, everything that makes sports incredible. Congrats India, so well deserved! SA was incredible. Amazing.”

Congratulating the Men in Blue, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Nadella said, “What a final. Congrats, India, and well played, South Africa. Super World Cup… let us have more cricket in the West Indies and USA.”

Meanwhile, Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra asked ChatGPT to make a graphic image showing the Indian cricket team as Superheroes.

“Because they were SuperCool till the end. The greatest gift of this final to India was that it didn’t come easy. It almost slipped out of their grasp. But they never lost the match in their minds,” he posted on X.

“Reminding all of us that being a Superhero never comes without a fierce determination to win and a Never Give In attitude. Jai Ho!” Mahindra said.

Earlier, Hardik Pandya’s 3-20 and Jasprit Bumrah’s 2-18 helped an unbeaten India to come back and clinch their second title in the shortest format with a seven-run win at the Kensington Oval.

Talismanic batter Virat Kohli stepped up to end his lean run with a 59-ball 76 to help India post a competitive 176/7, the highest total in a Men’s T20 World Cup final.

Kohli’s 72-run stand for the fourth wicket with Axar Patel, who made 47 off 31 balls, and a 57-run partnership with Shivam Dube, who hit a 16-ball 27, helped India go past the 175-run mark, as they scored 42 runs off the last three overs.

In reply, South Africa were very much in sight to chase down the total. But Hardik taking out Heinrich Klaasen propelled India to come back into the match and end a long 11-year global trophy drought as they restricted South Africa to 169/8.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

At Microsoft’s recent Build 2024 conference, CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the keynote with a captivating story about how technology empowered an Indian farmer. This anecdote served as a springboard for a series of exciting AI advancements, including updates to Azure and Copilot, along with groundbreaking innovations from Microsoft partners like OpenAI.

Mr Nadella shared, “In January 2023, I met a rural Indian farmer who used GPT-3.5, in his own voice, to understand government farm subsidies he’d heard about on television. It was a powerful moment for me. It illustrated the incredible impact of a cutting-edge model developed on the West Coast of the United States, now being used to directly improve the life of a rural farmer in India.”

In January, during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, Mr Nadella in conversation with Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), cited the example of the Indian farmer. 

Mr Nadella shared that the farmer was trying to access some government programme. “He expressed a complex need in one of the local languages. This got translated and interpreted by a bot and a response came back saying go to a portal and here is how you will access the programme,” Mr Nadella revealed. 

The Microsoft CEO further shared that the farmer was initially hesitant to use the programme and asked the bot to do it on his behalf. “And, it completed it and the reason why it was able to complete it was that the developer building it had taken GPT [General Purpose Technology] and trained it over all of the government of India documents and then scaffolded it with the speech recognition software,” Mr Nadella added.

At the Build 2024 conference, Microsoft made a splash in the AI world with two key announcements. First, developers can now access OpenAI’s most powerful model yet, GPT-40. This cutting-edge tool promises to revolutionize AI capabilities.  Second, Microsoft introduced Phi-3-Vision, a new Small Language Model (SLM) with the remarkable ability to read and understand images.

These groundbreaking tools will be available on Microsoft’s Azure AI Studio, a one-stop shop for developers to leverage these advancements and push the boundaries of AI.

Microsoft didn’t stop there. They also unveiled powerful new virtual machines specifically designed for handling AI workloads with unmatched efficiency. Significantly, they became the first cloud provider to integrate AMD’s cutting-edge MI300X AI accelerator chip. This integration strengthens the Azure ND MI300X v5 virtual machine series, making it a powerhouse for running complex AI tasks.

New Delhi:

US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti recently claimed that in modern times, one cannot become a CEO in America unless they are of Indian descent. Mr Garcetti’s humorous quip came at the 2024 Indiaspora AI Summit at Stanford University recently. 

“The successes have happened, more than one in 10 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies now are Indian immigrants who studied in the US. The old joke was you could not become a CEO in the US if you were Indian, now the joke is you cannot become a CEO in America if you are not Indian, whether it is Google, Microsoft or Starbucks, people have come and made a big difference,” Mr Garcetti said. 

#WATCH | Delhi: US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti says, “The successes have happened, more than 1 in 10 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies now are Indian immigrants who studied in the US. The old joke was you could not become a CEO in the US if you are Indian, now the joke is you… pic.twitter.com/gTdvXng9mi

— ANI (@ANI) April 26, 2024

Google and its parent organisation Alphabet Inc. are overseen by Sundar Pichai while operations at Microsoft and Starbucks are led by Satya Nadella and Laxman Narasimhan, respectively. 

Speaking alongside Mr Garcetti, Indian-origin business leaders echoed similar sentiments while appreciating Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, particularly his role in positioning India as a global hub of innovation and progress. 

“India is perceived very differently in the global space. It’s a space of innovation. It’s a space of human capital. It’s a space of progress and innovation. And as we look forward, what Modi has been able to do is put India into the global map as a credible innovator, leader for all countries to invest in and grow,” said Informatica CEO Amit Walia.

Similarly, Ashutosh Kulkarni, CEO of Elastic, commended PM Modi’s government for its openness to innovation and industry, noting India’s vast potential for progress. Navin Chaddha of Mayfield Fund hailed the “amazing” era under PM Modi’s leadership.

The Indiaspora AI Summit, besides global tech tycoons, was also attended by Rajya Sabha MP Satnam Singh Sandhu.

Microsoft Corp. was willing to hide its search engine’s “Bing” brand on Apple Inc. devices in order to secure an agreement with the iPhone maker and unseat Google, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella testified Monday.

Taking the stand at Google’s antitrust trial, Microsoft’s Nadella described the lengths his company was willing to go to become Apple’s default search engine, a position that Google currently enjoys. That included offering “strategic flexibility” on how to brand the search engine and encouraging Apple to look at its technology independently of the Bing brand.

The testimony was part of a Department of Justice trial against Google, which the government says has used its search dominance to quash competition and hurt consumers. The company’s agreement with Apple is central to that case. Google pays billions of dollars a year to be the default option for Apple devices, and Microsoft has tried – and failed – to offer a more attractive deal.

Getting that default spot from Apple would be “game changing,” Nadella said. “Whomever they choose, they king-make.”

Nadella did make inroads with Apple between 2013 and 2017, when the iPhone maker opted to replace Google as the search engine powering Siri and the Spotlight feature on its devices. Apple, however, never dropped Google as the default in its Safari web browser and reverted back to Google in the other areas after only four years.

The discussion about dropping the Bing brand happened during negotiations in 2018. The arrangement would have meant Safari search results were powered by Bing, but under an alternative brand.

Nadella said he has tried to replace Google as Apple’s default search engine every year since he became CEO in 2014. In earlier testimony Monday, he said Apple used Microsoft to “bid up the price” it gets paid by Google.

“Do you think Google would continue to pay Apple if there was no search competition? Why would they do that?” he said.

Apple services chief Eddy Cue has said he works with Google because the Mountain View, California-based company provides the best search results. The iPhone maker gets roughly $8 billion annually from the Google deal, which is structured as a revenue-share agreement.

Microsoft had even offered to sell Bing to Apple around 2020, Bloomberg News reported last week. Cue declined that overture.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)