• Drift Protocol confirms $280 million crypto theft via sophisticated attack abusing durable nonces
• Hackers hijacked Security Council powers through misrepresented transaction approvals and social engineering
• Deposits in borrow/lend, vaults, and trading affected; incident marks largest crypto heist of 2026 so far

Decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Drift has confirmed suffering a cyberattack in which threat actors stole hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens.

On April 1 2026,, Drift Protocol posted on X, saying it was “experiencing an active attack”, and that all deposits and withdrawals were suspended as a result.

Microsoft on Wednesday launched three new foundational AI models it built entirely in-house — a state-of-the-art speech transcription system, a voice generation engine, and an upgraded image creator — marking the most concrete evidence yet that the $3 trillion software giant intends to compete directly with OpenAI, Google, and other frontier labs on model development, not just distribution.

The trio of models — MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2 — are available immediately through Microsoft Foundry and a new MAI Playground. They span three of the most commercially valuable modalities in enterprise AI: converting speech to text, generating realistic human voice, and creating images. Together, they represent the opening salvo from Microsoft’s superintelligence team, which Suleyman formed just six months ago to pursue what he calls “AI self-sufficiency.”

“I’m very excited that we’ve now got the first models out, which are the very best in the world for transcription,” Suleyman told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview ahead of the launch. “Not only that, we’re able to deliver the model with half the GPUs of the state-of-the-art competition.”

The announcement lands at a precarious moment for Microsoft. The company’s stock just closed its worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis, as investors increasingly demand proof that hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure spending will translate into revenue. These models — priced aggressively and positioned to reduce Microsoft’s own cost of goods sold — are Suleyman’s first answer to that pressure.

Microsoft’s new transcription model claims best-in-class accuracy across 25 languages

MAI-Transcribe-1 is the headline release. The speech-to-text model achieves the lowest average Word Error Rate on the FLEURS benchmark — the industry-standard multilingual test — across the top 25 languages by Microsoft product usage, averaging 3.8% WER. According to Microsoft’s benchmarks, it beats OpenAI’s Whisper-large-v3 on all 25 languages, Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash on 22 of 25, and ElevenLabs’ Scribe v2 and OpenAI’s GPT-Transcribe on 15 of 25 each.

The model uses a transformer-based text decoder with a bi-directional audio encoder. It accepts MP3, WAV, and FLAC files up to 200MB, and Microsoft says its batch transcription speed is 2.5 times faster than the existing Microsoft Azure Fast offering. Diarization, contextual biasing, and streaming are listed as “coming soon.” Microsoft is already testing MAI-Transcribe-1 inside Copilot’s Voice mode and Microsoft Teams for conversation transcription — a detail that underscores how quickly the company intends to replace third-party or older internal models with its own.

Alongside it, MAI-Voice-1 is Microsoft’s text-to-speech model, capable of generating 60 seconds of natural-sounding audio in a single second. The model preserves speaker identity across long-form content and now supports custom voice creation from just a few seconds of audio through Microsoft Foundry. Microsoft is pricing it at $22 per 1 million characters. MAI-Image-2, meanwhile, debuted as a top-three model family on the Arena.ai leaderboard and now delivers at least 2x faster generation times on Foundry and Copilot compared to its predecessor. Microsoft is rolling it out across Bing and PowerPoint, pricing it at $5 per 1 million tokens for text input and $33 per 1 million tokens for image output. WPP, one of the world’s largest advertising holding companies, is among the first enterprise partners building with MAI-Image-2 at scale.

The contract renegotiation with OpenAI that made Microsoft’s model ambitions possible

To understand why these models matter, you have to understand the contractual tectonic shift that made them possible. Until October 2025, Microsoft was contractually prohibited from independently pursuing artificial general intelligence. The original deal with OpenAI, signed in 2019, gave Microsoft a license to OpenAI’s models in exchange for building the cloud infrastructure OpenAI needed. But when OpenAI sought to expand its compute footprint beyond Microsoft — striking deals with SoftBank and others — Microsoft renegotiated. As Suleyman explained in a December 2025 interview with Bloomberg, the revised agreement meant that “up until a few weeks ago, Microsoft was not allowed — by contract — to pursue artificial general intelligence or superintelligence independently.” The new terms freed Microsoft to build its own frontier models while retaining license rights to everything OpenAI builds through 2032.

Suleyman described the dynamic to VentureBeat in characteristically blunt terms. “Back in September of last year, we renegotiated the contract with OpenAI, and that enabled us to independently pursue our own superintelligence,” he said. “Since then, we’ve been convening the compute and the team and buying up the data that we need.”

He was quick to emphasize that the OpenAI partnership remains intact. “Nothing’s changing with the OpenAI partnership. We will be in partnership with them at least until 2032 and hopefully a lot longer,” Suleyman said. “They have been a phenomenal partner to us.” He also highlighted that Microsoft provides access to Anthropic’s Claude through its Foundry API, framing the company as “a platform of platforms.” But the subtext is unmistakable: Microsoft is building the capability to stand on its own. In March, as Business Insider first reported, Suleyman wrote in an internal memo that his goal is to “focus all my energy on our Superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world class models for Microsoft over the next 5 years.” CNBC reported that the structural shift freed Suleyman from day-to-day Copilot product responsibilities, with former Snap executive Jacob Andreou taking over as EVP of the combined consumer and commercial Copilot experience.

How teams of fewer than 10 engineers built models that rival Big Tech’s best

Perhaps the most striking detail Suleyman shared with VentureBeat is how small the teams behind these models actually are. “The audio model was built by 10 people, and the vast majority of the speed, efficiency and accuracy gains come from the model architecture and the data that we have used,” Suleyman said. “My philosophy has always been that we need fewer people who are more empowered. So we operate an extremely flat structure.” He added: “Our image team, equally, is less than 10 people. So this is all about model and data innovation, which has delivered state of the art performance.”

This matters for two reasons. First, it challenges the prevailing industry narrative that frontier AI development requires thousands of researchers and billions in headcount costs. Meta, by contrast, has pursued what Suleyman described in his Bloomberg interview as a strategy of “hiring a lot of individuals, rather than maybe creating a team” — including reported compensation packages of $100 million to $200 million for top researchers. Second, small teams producing state-of-the-art results dramatically improve the economics. If Microsoft can build best-in-class transcription with 10 engineers and half the GPUs of competitors, the margin structure of its AI business looks fundamentally different from companies burning through cash to achieve similar benchmarks.

The lean-team philosophy also echoes Suleyman’s broader views on how AI is already reshaping the work of building AI itself. When asked by VentureBeat how his own team works, Suleyman described an environment that resembles a startup trading floor more than a traditional Microsoft engineering org. “There are groups of people around round tables, circular tables, not traditional desks, on laptops instead of big screens,” he said. “They’re basically vibe coding, side by side all day, morning till night, in rooms of 50 or 60 people.”

Why Suleyman’s “humanist AI” pitch is aimed squarely at enterprise buyers

Suleyman has been steadily building a philosophical brand around Microsoft’s AI efforts that he calls “humanist AI” — a term that appeared prominently in the blog post he authored for the launch and that he elaborated on in our interview. “I think that the motivation of a humanist super intelligence is to create something that is truly in service of humanity,” he told VentureBeat. “Humans will remain in control at the top of the food chain, and they will be always aligned to human interests.”

The framing serves multiple purposes. It differentiates Microsoft from the more acceleration-oriented rhetoric coming from OpenAI and Meta. It resonates with enterprise buyers who need governance, compliance, and safety assurances before deploying AI in regulated industries. And it provides a narrative hedge: if something goes wrong in the broader AI ecosystem, Microsoft can point to its stated commitment to human control. In his December Bloomberg interview, Suleyman went further, describing containment and alignment as “red lines” and arguing that no one should release a superintelligence tool until they are “confident it can be controlled.”

Suleyman also stressed data provenance as a competitive advantage, describing a conversation with CEO Satya Nadella about developing “a clean lineage of models where the data is extremely clean.” He drew an implicit contrast with open-source alternatives, noting that “many of the open-source models have been trained on data in, let’s say, inappropriate ways. And there are potentially security issues with that.” For enterprise customers evaluating AI vendors amid a thicket of copyright lawsuits across the industry, that is a meaningful commercial argument — if Microsoft can credibly claim that its training data was acquired through properly licensed channels, it reduces the legal and reputational risk of deploying these models in production.

Microsoft’s aggressive pricing puts pressure on Amazon, Google, and the AI startup ecosystem

Today’s launch positions Microsoft on three competitive fronts simultaneously. MAI-Transcribe-1 directly targets the transcription workloads that OpenAI’s Whisper models have dominated in the open-source community, with Microsoft claiming superior accuracy on all 25 benchmarked languages. The FLEURS results also show it winning against Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite on 22 of 25 languages — a direct challenge as Google aggressively pushes Gemini across its own product suite. And MAI-Voice-1‘s ability to clone voices from seconds of audio and generate speech at 60x real-time puts it in competition with ElevenLabs, Resemble AI, and the growing ecosystem of voice AI startups, with Microsoft’s distribution advantage — any Foundry developer can now access these capabilities through the same API they use for GPT-4 and Claude — acting as a powerful moat.

Suleyman framed the competitive position confidently: “We’re now a top three lab just under OpenAI and Gemini,” he told VentureBeat. The pricing strategy — MAI-Voice-1 at $22 per million characters, MAI-Image-2 at $5 per million input tokens — reflects a deliberate decision to compete on cost. “We’re pricing them to be the very best of any hyperscaler. So there will be the cheapest of any of the hyperscalers out there, Amazon. And obviously Google,” Suleyman said. “And that’s a very conscious decision.”

This makes strategic sense for Microsoft, which can amortize model development costs across its enormous installed base of enterprise customers. But it also speaks to the question investors have been asking with increasing urgency: when does AI spending start generating returns? Microsoft’s stock has fallen roughly 17% year-to-date, according to CNBC, part of a broader selloff in software stocks. By building models that run on half the GPUs of competitors, Microsoft reduces its own infrastructure costs for internal products — Teams, Copilot, Bing, PowerPoint — while offering developers pricing designed to undercut the rest of the market. In his March memo, Suleyman wrote that his models would “enable us to deliver the COGS efficiencies necessary to be able to serve AI workloads at the immense scale required in the coming years.” These three models are the first tangible delivery on that promise.

Suleyman says a frontier large language model is coming — and Microsoft plans to be “completely independent”

Suleyman made clear that transcription, voice, and image generation are just the beginning. When asked whether Microsoft would build a large language model to compete directly with GPT at the frontier level, he was unequivocal. “We absolutely are going to be delivering state of the art models across all modalities,” he said. “Our mission is to make sure that if Microsoft ever needs it, we will be able to provide state of the art at the best efficiency, the cheapest price, and be completely independent.”

He described a multi-year roadmap to “set up the GPU clusters at the appropriate scale,” noting that the superintelligence team was formally stood up only in October 2025. Suleyman spoke to VentureBeat from Miami, where the full team was convening for one of its regular week-long in-person sessions. He described Nadella flying in for the gathering to lay out “the roadmap of everything that we need to achieve for our AI self-sufficiency mission over the next 2, 3, 4 years, and all the compute roadmap that that would involve.”

Building a competitive frontier LLM, of course, is a different order of magnitude in complexity, data requirements, and compute cost from what Microsoft demonstrated Wednesday. The models launched today are specialized — they handle audio and images, not the general reasoning and text generation that underpin products like ChatGPT or Copilot’s core intelligence. Suleyman has the organizational mandate, Nadella’s public backing, and the contractual freedom. What he doesn’t yet have is a track record at Microsoft of delivering on the hardest problem in AI.

But consider what he does have: three models that are best-in-class or near it in their respective domains, built by teams smaller than most seed-stage startups, running on half the industry-standard GPU footprint, and priced below every major cloud competitor. Two years ago, Suleyman proposed in MIT Technology Review what he called the “Modern Turing Test” — not whether AI could fool a human in conversation, but whether it could go out into the world and accomplish real economic tasks with minimal oversight. On Wednesday, his own models took a step toward that vision. The question now is whether Microsoft’s superintelligence team can repeat the trick at the scale that actually matters — and whether they can do it before the market’s patience runs out.

Sony has confirmed that PlayStation console prices will increase globally starting April 2, 2026, affecting several models across major regions and making current PlayStation deals potentially some of the last opportunities to buy the consoles at existing retail prices.

The updated pricing affects the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 5 Digital Edition, and PlayStation 5 Pro, with new recommended retail prices reaching $649.99 for the standard PS5, $599.99 for the Digital Edition, and $899.99 for the PS5 Pro in the United States.

With prices rising across the US, UK, Europe and Japan, current deals on PlayStation consoles are likely to become more appealing for buyers who want to enter the PlayStation ecosystem before retailers begin reflecting the higher official prices.

Below are some of the best PlayStation deals currently available, covering the PS5 Pro, the standard PS5 console, and the Digital Edition, each offering slightly different benefits depending on how you prefer to play.

PlayStation 5 Pro

The PlayStation 5 Pro represents the most powerful console in the PlayStation lineup and targets players who want the best graphics performance possible from Sony’s current hardware generation.

Following Sony’s pricing update, the PS5 Pro now carries a recommended retail price of $899.99 in the United States, £789.99 in the UK, and €899.99 in Europe, making deals on this premium model particularly valuable before retailers adjust their listings.

The console focuses on enhanced visual performance, improved ray tracing capabilities, and higher-resolution gaming output that aims to take fuller advantage of modern 4K televisions and high-refresh-rate displays.

For players who want the most future-proof PlayStation console, the PS5 Pro offers the strongest hardware platform available right now, making it a compelling option for demanding titles and visually intensive games.

PlayStation 5

The standard PlayStation 5 remains the most versatile option in the lineup because it includes a built-in disc drive that allows players to run both physical and digital games.

Under Sony’s updated pricing structure, the standard PS5 now sits at $649.99 in the US, £569.99 in the UK, and €649.99 across Europe, increasing the appeal of any retailer discounts that still reflect earlier pricing.

That flexibility makes it especially attractive for players who already own physical PlayStation game collections or who prefer buying discs that can be resold, traded, or shared between consoles.

The standard PS5 also continues to deliver strong performance across the current generation of games, supporting 4K output, fast loading through Sony’s SSD architecture, and access to the full PlayStation ecosystem.

PlayStation 5 Digital Edition

The PlayStation 5 Digital Edition offers the same core gaming performance as the standard PS5 but removes the disc drive in favour of a fully digital gaming experience.

Sony’s updated pricing places the Digital Edition at $599.99 in the US, £519.99 in the UK, and €599.99 in Europe, which keeps it as the most affordable entry point into the PlayStation console lineup.

This approach suits players who buy their games directly through the PlayStation Store and prefer the convenience of maintaining a digital library that can be downloaded instantly across multiple devices.

Because the Digital Edition typically carries a lower retail price than the disc version, it often represents the most accessible way to step into the PlayStation platform while still delivering the same gaming capabilities.

With Sony confirming global price increases across the PlayStation lineup starting April 2, current PlayStation console deals may become harder to find once retailers begin adjusting prices to match the updated recommended retail values.

Paris-based Omniscient ingests 100,000+ sources, press, social, web, video, audio, internal pipelines, and synthesises them into a two-minute executive briefing. Renault is an early client. A global syndicate spanning France, Japan, and the US backed the round.

Omniscient, the Paris-based decision intelligence platform built for boards and senior executives, has raised $4.1 million in pre-seed funding led by Seedcamp.

Additional investors include Drysdale, Plug and Play, MS&AD, Raise, Anamcara, and xdeck, with Bpifrance also participating. The company was co-founded by Arnaud d’Estienne, who serves as CEO, and Mehdi Benseghir, both formerly of McKinsey.

The problem Omniscient is addressing is specific: large organisations manage more than 150 disparate intelligence platforms, each covering a different channel, geography, or function, with no single view of what matters.

Communications and intelligence teams are built to react to crises rather than anticipate them. By the time a significant signal surfaces through manual monitoring, the moment for proactive response has often passed.

Corporate reputation represents an average of approximately 30% of market capitalisation for the world’s largest listed companies, according to widely cited research.

A signal missed hours too late can mean billions wiped from market value before a communications team has even convened.

Omniscient’s platform ingests data from more than 100,000 sources across press, social media, web, video, audio, and internal pipelines, then synthesises that into a two-minute executive briefing updated in real time.

At the core is a proprietary architecture of specialist AI agents, each covering a defined domain, stories, regulation, supply chain, competition, that feed into a unified management cockpit.

The platform is designed for C-level users rather than analysts: no manual configuration, natural language interaction throughout, and a system that grows more attuned to an organisation’s priorities with use.

Renault is named as an early client. The company claims its AI-native approach is 50 times faster than legacy manual monitoring workflows, a benchmark derived from its own assessments.

The funding will go to engineering hires, product development, and commercial rollout. The roadmap extends into predictive analytics: the platform aims to tell organisations not just what is happening but what is likely to happen next and what to do about it, drawing on historical precedent, competitor behaviour, and real-time signal patterns.

Sia Houchangnia, Partner at Seedcamp, described Omniscient as “technically differentiated and commercially validated from day one,” pointing to the calibre of early design partners as the signal.

The investor syndicate spans France, Japan, and the United States, with Bpifrance’s involvement adding a French state-backed dimension to a round that is otherwise built around global fintech and deep tech specialist investors.

The bike also has a front fork with 80 millimeters of suspension, so accidentally piloting all 60 pounds of it into a pothole won’t pitch you head over heels. It’s fully loaded, with integrated lights, fenders, and a kickstand. And finally, the Vida E+ is UL-certified, so it won’t catch on fire while charging in your garage. The RideControl app lets you check your bike’s electronic systems for problems, lock your bike, and, if you have a bike mount, use it for rudimentary navigation.

Quality Components

Riding the Vida E+ feels like riding a couch, but in a good way. This is a bike that will do everything for you, without your having to think about it very much (unless you’re trying to maneuver it between two cars in your driveway). The step-through frame makes it easy to get on or off. The sit-up geometry and ergonomic handlebars are incredibly comfortable; I can ride with one hand, slowly pedaling at 9 mph while biking my kids home from school, and they blabber on about whatever.

Photograph: Adrienne So

Because this is a bike made by Giant, the components are very nice, for a reasonable price. I can easily read the display in high-glare natural sunlight. The fork is made by Suntour; while I would definitely not take this bike on trails, I hit many potholes, both on purpose and not, without dumping myself. The brakes are high-performance Tektro four-piston hydraulic disc brakes, which is also a little unusual at the price point. You don’t have to worry about being able to make quick stops on hills or with a heavy load.

The Shimano shifters work well with the SyncDrive motor to climb steep hills. I did find that the buttons are not terribly easy to push, and I also tended to mix up the headlight and power buttons at the top, which my kids find annoying when they’ve taken off and I’m still struggling to get a 60-pound bike moving without assistance.

The new  25th Anniversary Vinylphyle restoration of Erykah Badu’s chart-toping 2000 album Mama’s Gun is an excellent reissue which should be of interest to fans of vocal jazz and modern soul sounds as well as analog loving audiophiles.

A platinum seller with three hit singles including her first top 10, this is a super chill, fluid grooving and melodic song cycle often categorized as “neo-soul” and bridging pop, soul, funk, jazz, hip hop and even singer-songwriter pop. While I’ve read numerous references to Billie Holiday in discussing Ms. Badu’s vocal style, I also hear strong Dinah Washington flavors by way of Minnie Ripperton and Chaka Kahn (which are some pretty great touchstones as well).  

As with other Vinylphyle releases in this top-notch new series from Universal Music, Mama’s Gun was pressed at RTI — renown as one of the best vinyl manufacturing facilities in the world. The 180-gram vinyl is dark and well centered. The production quality elements throughout are also outstanding, the album cover is made of heavy cardboard stock akin to a vintage jazz album from 1960s on Verve or Blue Note. Each disc comes housed in an audiophile-grade plastic lined inner-sleeve.  

From Universal’s udiscovermusic website we’ve also gleaned some additional information which reveals that this release is more than “just” a reissue but a genuine restoration of note for fans seeking the best quality version of a favorite album.

There we learn: 

“There are no sequenced analog masters for Mama’s Gun. The original 44.1kHz/16-bit files, with the original CD mastering and limiting, have been the only source for all digital and vinyl reissues—until now. The record was reassembled and rebuilt digitally from 14 individual track tapes, newly transferred in 96kHz/24-bit, in order to create the first true remaster of this record since it came out 25 years ago.”

In the new liner notes for the album Ms. Badu adds insights into her passion for analog at the crossroads of digital: “With this remastering, we’ve carefully blended analog warmth with digital precision. It’s breathtaking to hear the subtleties of each layer come alive in a new way, making the project resonate even more powerfully.”

Indeed, what a lush round sound Mama’s Gun delivers! Largely played by live musicians in top studios including New York’s iconic Electric Lady (which was created by Jimi Hendrix), no less than The Roots’ Questlove is featured on drums on many of the tracks.  

It is haunting hearing “In Love with You” which features vocal contributions from Stephen Marley — Bob Marley’s second son — supported mostly by lovely softly strummed nylon string acoustic guitar. Ms. Badu’s  hit “Bag Lady” (#6 Billboard Top 100) was co-written with soul legend Issac Hayes and received two Grammy nominations that year. “Cleva” — which features Roy Ayers on Vibraphone, feels almost like a lost Stevie Wonder tune. 

if you ever liked early Meshell Ndegeocello albums like her 1999 masterwork Bitter or even newer artists like New Orleans’ Tank & The Bangas, you might well enjoy Mama’s Gun. Highly recommended. 

Universal’s Vinylphyle series 2LP release of Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun is currently exclusively available via udiscovermusic for $54.98.

Mark Smotroff is a deep music enthusiast / collector who has also worked in entertainment oriented marketing communications for decades supporting the likes of DTS, Sega and many others. He reviews vinyl for Analog Planet and has written for Audiophile Review, Sound+Vision, Mix, EQ, etc.  You can learn more about him at LinkedIn.