SOFTWARE

AI at Work roadmap is the new name for upcoming Microsoft 365 capabilities

Microsoft is dusting off the rebrandogun again, and this time it’s aimed at the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. The list of hopes and dreams will henceforth be called the AI at Work roadmap.

The notification popped up in the Microsoft 365 admin center earlier this week with the words “The AI at Work Roadmap provides a single destination to discover upcoming innovations across Microsoft 365, Copilot, agents, and related AI-powered experiences.”

Information for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Dataverse will be added from September.

In its announcement, Microsoft stated, “We’re making this change because of how our customers actually work.”

Other changes include when roadmap information appears. Instead of the twice-yearly release wave 1 and 2 model, Microsoft intends to publish new capabilities as soon as plans are committed. This means, in theory, administrators will have more notice of incoming features and functionality.

The full transition will take time. Although the renaming has already happened, and other capabilities will be published to the AI at Work roadmap from September, existing roadmap content in public preview or with a General Availability date of June 1, 2026, or later, will also transition to the “AI at Work roadmap experience.” This will take until November 15, 2026.

Earlier this month, an enterprising Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) created the Microsoft Rebrand Registry. We look forward to the addition of the Microsoft 365 roadmap.

All in all, it’s an odd decision, and perhaps a slightly cynical way of shoving AI in administrators’ faces. Microsoft 365 Copilot, the company’s flagship AI technology, is available as a paid add-on, and adoption has hardly set the world alight, despite the investment poured into it. In June, a sueball was thrown at the company, with the lawsuit alleging “Microsoft had failed to convert a significant percentage of its commercial Microsoft 365 users to paid Copilot subscriptions.”

For its part, Microsoft told The Register that the claims in the complaint were “without merit.”

Regardless, renaming a roadmap with which administrators were familiar to something prefixed with AI smacks of marketing desperation on the part of Microsoft. Heaven forbid the company might have better things to do with its time than rename something that users were already happy with, and understood. ®

Boston Dynamics spent years sending Atlas over boxes and through parkour courses with almost nothing on top that looked like a head. Hydraulic Atlas lived as a research machine built for flips, runs, and balance tests. Forward sensors were enough when the only job was reading the ground a few steps ahead.

Electric Atlas now has a new job that requires a robot with the ability to see beyond the immediate surroundings. Factories are typically a maze of people, carts, bins, and shelves, and a robot with a fixed stare will almost certainly run into people. As mechanical engineer Taylor Frey-Baker points out, it requires a broader view and a better sense of the room because it must work alongside humans rather than just carry heavy loads, and as a result of that shift in focus, a head and some cameras were added.

Unitree R1 Humanoid Robot (White, R1)

• Three models, one lightweight platform R1 Air (20 DOF, monocular camera), R1 (26 DOF, binocular camera, head+waist joints), and R1 Edu (26 DOF…
• Easy setup – no coding required for basic use Unbox, power on, and start. Manual teaching feature: physically pose the robot, and it replays the…
• More DOF = more expressive movement 26‑DOF models (R1 / R1 Edu) add head and waist articulation for smoother dance and running. For safety reasons…

Cameras are mounted on heads for a reason: they keep them out of the way of arms and shoulders, which can otherwise block the vision. Aaron Abroff, the industrial design lead, likened it to volume mapping in 3D space, which would allow Atlas to view all of the fixtures, parts, and grippers at once. The neck joint may tilt slightly, about ten degrees, which is useful for gaining a better view of the floor or a tall shelf. It also gives a nice little nod when someone enters the area.

Turning and looking around are now part of the package. The head, torso, and limbs can all spin 360 degrees without any wires getting in the way. That’s a huge bonus because Scott Kuindersma has stated that wires can become damaged over time, and not having to deal with turns saves seconds on a line. It allows Atlas to take a good hard look behind it or set off in an entirely different direction without having to walk back and forth multiple times. Safety specifications now include 360-degree camera coverage as part of a safety system adopted from the world of self-driving automobiles, which is designed so that plant managers can sign off on the robot’s ability to recognize humans and hazards.

A full-fledged computer can be found deep within the robot’s shell. James Cuseo, who worked at Apple for 12 years before joining Boston Dynamics, claims that the head of the new Atlas is the most difficult object he’s ever built because it must stay cool, dry, and withstand a two-meter drop onto a table edge while carrying the weight of running the entire head. The computing parts are capable of being removed like a game cartridge. The entire head can even be unclipped, worked on at a desk, and then fitted back on, allowing you to upgrade the sensors and chips every year. With the head swappable feature, the corporation can continue to use the same old body while the head receives all of the enhancements.

The new Atlas has a completely different set of functions than the old one, as it must pick auto parts, sequence bins at Hyundai, and operate for four hours on a single pack. It must also be capable of lifting 50 kilogram loads in a single burst while remaining able to stop and start as someone walks across its path. The head houses all of the cameras, the computer, the lights, and the joint that controls them all. Swappable modules are important because they ensure that when the next version of the head is released, the rest of the robot does not need to be updated. That is why this machine, known for performing backflips, is now walking about the facility with a round glowing head that refuses to stop moving.
[Source]

Why it matters: Nvidia is reportedly close to buying Hugging Face for a staggering $12.9 billion. If completed, the transaction would put the main supplier of AI processors in control of the platform that has become one of the most important hubs for sharing open AI models and supporting developer collaboration.

The Information reports that Nvidia has agreed to the purchase, citing one person with knowledge of the agreement. A separate Business Insider report is less definitive, saying the companies held serious talks at a valuation above $13 billion but had not signed an agreement. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has publicly confirmed the reports.

If it does close at the stated price, Hugging Face would become Nvidia’s largest completed takeover, surpassing the $7 billion it paid for Mellanox in 2020.

The startup is often described as the GitHub of AI, providing a central hub where developers publish, discover, test, and deploy models and datasets. Hugging Face says its community reached 13 million users, more than two million public models, and over 500,000 public datasets in 2025.

The Information says Hugging Face recently generated about $150 million in annualized revenue, putting the reported price at roughly 86 times that figure. Its previous funding round raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation in 2023, with Nvidia joining Salesforce, Google, Amazon, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and IBM as investors.

Nvidia and Hugging Face have a history of collaboration. There was their 2023 partnership that connected Hugging Face models to Nvidia’s DGX Cloud for training and fine-tuning. The pair later expanded into on-demand training clusters. Hugging Face also works with AMD, AWS, and Google, making platform neutrality a concern if the AI industry’s dominant chip supplier becomes its new owner.

– Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) July 24, 2026

Buying Hugging Face could give Nvidia greater influence over how developers find, share, optimize, and deploy AI models. The move also aligns with Jensen Huang’s public support for open models. Nvidia’s CEO believes wider access encourages AI adoption and ultimately creates more demand for chips and data centers. Nvidia and Hugging Face also signed the same industry letter urging US policymakers to keep advanced model weights accessible. The company can certainly afford the deal, having just reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue and $59.7 billion in net income.”

“I think Nvidia is very much a community, a platform-based company, and in that respect, I think Hugging Face fits perfectly within that. There is this five-layer cake from Nvidia, and foundational models are one of them,” Siddy Jobe, a fund manager at Eonopolis Exponential Technologies funds, told CNBC. “It is clear that Nvidia wants to be integrated in the entire stack vertically, going from energy to foundational models and also to applications,” he added.

Hugging Face reportedly rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment late last year at a $7 billion valuation because it didn’t want one dominant backer influencing decisions. One would expect that full ownership will raise that concern again, and regulators may agree.

Similar fears surrounded Nvidia’s proposed Arm purchase, a $40 billion deal that collapsed in 2022 under global antitrust pressure.

from the maybe-don’t-fuck-with-people-who-actually-know-the-law dept

The thing about raiding law offices is that they tend to be filled with people who actually know the law. A bunch of opportunistic ICE officers thought they might be able to talk their way into an illegal search, but that initiative (is that the word for this?) died out almost immediately when the interloping officers were greeted by a small group of immigration lawyers.

As is to be expected, this attempted illegal raid occurred in a “blue” state — the states that are still seeing large amounts of immigration officer activity just because their populations refused to throw a majority of their support behind Donald Trump during the last three elections.

The Sacramento Bee broke the news, covered here by Mathew Miranda:

Multiple U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents armed with guns attempted to inspect a Sacramento immigration law firm — and threatened to return later and break windows — on Friday morning, according to several employees of the building.

Employees of the North Natomas law firm and next door dentistry office said the agents, who arrived in at least four vehicles, claimed to have received a list from Washington, D.C., which listed the building’s address as the primary mailing address for many people. The ICE agents requested to tour the office for beds, but were ultimately turned away after failing to provide a warrant.

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You can see the pretense. And you can see how everyone else would have recognized it was a pretense, even if the ICE officers hadn’t backed down immediately in the face of “get a warrant” demands from the occupants of the law office.

ICE pretended that a lot of migrants using the law office as a mailing address (something likely limited to court documents, etc.) was evidence that the law office was illegally housing dozens of migrants. But, as a migrant trying to work your way through the immigration system, it just makes sense to list a law office as the address of contact when engaging court proceedings, especially if your housing situation may be in a constant state of flux. Telling courts to send summons, notices, etc. to your legal reps is the smart way to handle things like naturalization proceedings, given that the rules seem to keep changing, and our current government is doing whatever it can to disrupt immigration proceedings to maximize arrests and detentions.

It would be immediately clear to anyone but an opportunistic ICE thug that the Morris Law Office was incapable of housing a large number of migrants. It’s a strip mall law office that shares a building with a dental implant clinic.

Having rushed directly into a stone wall composed of well-composed immigration lawyers (as well as the absolute stupidity of having to pretend a strip mall law office could be a second home for a large number of migrants), ICE officers retreated empty-handed, but not before issuing a threat that only later proved to be as empty as their fingerless gloved hands:

Raissa Morris, owner of the Morris Law Group, received a text at 9:16 a.m. which read “immigration is here.” The message came from one of her employees who told her an agent, who was armed and wearing an ICE badge, had entered the front lobby and asked to speak to an office manager.

She quickly told one of her employees to tell an agent that they could not inspect the building without a warrant. The agent responded by saying that they had received a list from Washington, D.C., which featured multiple clients using the law firm’s address. He asked to inspect the office for beds and said if they received follow-up orders that they could return at 3 a.m. to break windows and enter.

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Thugs to the very end. “If you won’t let us abuse our power and ignore your rights, we’ll just ask someone back at the office to swear out some paperwork that will let us get what we want without your cooperation.” Obviously, this paraphrasing is far more coherent and polite than anything uttered by your average ICE officer (and, at this point, almost any ICE officer would be lucky to be considered “average”). But the ultimate point remains: if ICE doesn’t get what it wants immediately, it will find a way to get it eventually.

Additional coverage by local news station KCRA includes some on-site reporting, along with screenshots of several photos of ICE vehicles shared by law firm employees. It also includes a comment from the DHS, which apparently couldn’t be bothered to respond to questions from reporters at the publication that first broke the news.

In a statement to KCRA 3, DHS said, “On August 14, ICE officers approached an unmarked door during a targeted enforcement operation, thinking it was the target address as it was listed as the address of the illegal aliens they were planning to arrest. Upon finding out it was a law firm; they departed the address.”

This statement is only true if you ignore the officers’ attempt to engage in a warrantless search, as well as the parting threat they issued when they were ejected by Morris Law employees. ICE had to know it was a law firm because that would be the first result in any normal search of that address. And officers couldn’t pretend it was just some hostel for migrants when they rolled up in at least four separate unmarked vehicles. They were clearly in a quasi-strip mall parking lot facing a business with the business name clearly displayed above the address the DHS now claims was so inscrutable it took an accosting and a confrontation with people who actually know and respect the law to inform the officers of their “mistake.”

The DHS statement is idiotic, which just means it’s on-brand for this administration. So far, the threat to come back and break windows while no one’s in the office has yet to materialize. But this government is filled with sore losers and sore winners (that would be the big baby boy sitting behind the Resolute Desk), so I wouldn’t put any money on ICE just taking this L and moving on to other things.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, california, dhs, ice, masked thugs, mass deportation, raissa morris

Companies: morris law group

The Whoop Meridian takes a screenless fitness tracker that usually looks sporty and turns it into a luxury accessory. Rather than a silicone band, you’re looking at a tapered metal mesh band, magnetic clasp, and four finishes designed to look more at home alongside jewelry than running shoes. Whoop is selling Meridian in Gold, Rose Gold, Alloy, and Black for $149 starting today.

There’s just one small problem. One of Whoop’s biggest ideas is that you’re supposed to wear its tracker continuously, and higher-tier Whoop 5.0 memberships even include a wireless power pack that can charge the tracker while it remains on your wrist. But unfortunately, Meridian can’t do that.

Looking better means taking it off

Whoop’s wireless charger cannot send power through Meridian’s metal band, so the tracker has to come off before it can be charged. So you’re not getting that convenient feature on Whoop’s existing design, particularly for users obsessive enough about continuous health data to dislike gaps in their tracking.

The company addressed the new design in its official announcement, talking about how it now matches the occasions where people might normally remove a fitness tracker — dinners, events, travel, or simply situations where a fabric sports band doesn’t complement what they’re wearing.

The Milanese-style mesh, tapered silhouette, and continuously adjustable magnetic clasp are supposed to turn the Whoop into something closer to jewelry. I can see the appeal. During our review of the Whoop 5.0, we found the standard model comfortable and unobtrusive. Though its chunky fabric-band appearance was one of the hardware’s weaker points. Meridian addresses that complaint rather directly.

Google’s Fitbit Air makes this look expensive

Meridian costs $149 for the band alone. You still need compatible Whoop hardware and an active membership, with Whoop’s subscriptions starting at $199 per year. Meanwhile, Google will sell you an entire Fitbit Air for $99.99. That’s a complete screenless health tracker with 24/7 heart-rate monitoring, sleep tracking, workout detection, up to seven days of battery life, and compatibility with Android and iOS. More importantly, its fundamental health-tracking features continue working without paying for Google Health Premium.

The two products are targeting slightly different customers. Whoop leans much harder into detailed recovery, strain, and performance data, while Fitbit Air is deliberately aimed at making passive health tracking simpler and cheaper. For $50 less than Whoop’s new strap, Google gives you the tracker too. So it mostly makes sense for users already in Whoop’s ecosystem.

Apple has confirmed that its autumn event will take place on 9 September at 10am Pacific time at Apple Park, under the tagline “Surprise and shine” and an invitation showing a sun rising behind the company logo.

The expectation is that it will finally show a foldable iPhone, a device IDC thinks could ship 10 million units in its first year at around $2,500.

The more consequential detail is what is not on the list. The standard iPhone 18 is expected to slip to a spring launch, which means Apple has quietly split the annual iPhone cycle into two events for the first time.

That is a bigger change than a new hinge. The September keynote has been the fixed point of the consumer technology calendar for well over a decade, and moving the volume model out of it changes what the event is for.

The foldable itself, reported variously as the iPhone Fold or iPhone Ultra, is expected in a book-style design with an outer display of around 5.3 in and an inner display near 7.8 in.

Reports describe a titanium frame and a display Apple has worked hard to make close to crease-free, which has been the visible weakness of every rival for seven years.

One design decision stands out from the rest. Face ID is expected to be replaced by Touch ID in the power button, presumably because there is nowhere sensible to put the sensor array on a device that folds.

Pricing expectations run from about $2,000 to $2,500, which would make it the most expensive iPhone Apple has sold by a considerable margin. Samsung has had this category largely to itself since 2019 and has never made it a volume business, so Apple arriving late and expensive is not the disadvantage it sounds.

Apple’s stated position on foldables has always been that the category was not yet good enough, which is roughly the argument it made about large screens and about styluses before adopting both. The test will be whether the hinge and the crease hold up over a couple of years rather than whether they impress in a demo.

The Pro models are the more conventional part of the event. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are expected to keep their current designs while gaining an A20 Pro chip built on a 2nm process, Apple’s own C2 modem, a variable-aperture main camera, and a smaller Dynamic Island.

A 2nm part would put Apple a full node ahead of most of the Android field, where Xiaomi’s in-house silicon is still on 3nm. Whether buyers notice is a separate question from whether it matters competitively.

There is also a reported price rise of roughly $300 on the Pro line, which would be unusually steep for Apple and is worth treating as a rumour rather than a plan. Component costs have moved sharply this year, particularly memory, so the direction is at least plausible.

Around the phones sits the usual supporting cast. An Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 are expected with new sensors rather than redesigns, alongside the AirPods, OLED iPad mini, and Mac mini refreshes already in the pipeline.

Durability is where foldables have historically disappointed buyers, and it is also the hardest thing to judge from a keynote. A $2,000 phone with a moving part is a warranty proposition as much as a product one.

The home products may be the quiet story. Updated HomePod mini and Apple TV hardware with Siri’s newer AI stack are expected, along with a home hub carrying a seven-inch screen and a FaceTime camera, which would be Apple’s first real attempt at a category Amazon and Google have occupied for years.

None of this is confirmed beyond the date, the venue, and the tagline, and Apple’s invitations have never been dependable guides to their contents.

What the schedule does confirm is that the company is willing to hold a September keynote without its highest-volume product on the stage, which is not a decision it has taken before.

We’re expecting to see the Galaxy S26 FE.