Matt Day

Jane Mayer on John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” His monumental report changed history, journalism, and me.

"Hiroshima," published in 1946, changed journalism, Jane Mayer writes.

It "was a model of what might be called the ethical exposé. It was built on rigorous reporting and meticulously observed details, and, through its quiet, almost affectless voice, the reader became another eyewitness."

The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die Families and funeral directors are using AI obituary generators to more efficiently memorialize the dead. What happens when they get it wrong?

New: A few weeks ago, when my father-in-law died, the funeral home asked if we wanted to use AI to write his obituary. So I dug into it and found that it's the biggest new trend in "death care." Tens of thousands of AI obits have been made already. Often the families don't even know wapo.st/4okuxIg

chart: capital expenditures, quarterly shows hockey-stick like growth in the capex expenditures of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and meta, almost entirely on data centers in the most recent quarter it was nearly $100 billion, collectively

The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/

The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone*

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sili...

Amazon Projects Profit That Underwhelms on AI Race Expense Amazon.com Inc. dropped in late trading after projecting weaker-than-expected operating income and trailing the sales growth of its cloud rivals, leaving investors searching for signs that the company...

“There is a Wall Street finance person narrative right now that AWS is falling behind." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Microsoft Gives Azure Cloud Sales for First Time at $75 Billion Microsoft Corp. said its Azure cloud-computing unit generated more than $75 billion during the 2025 fiscal year, the first time the company has put a dollar figure on a critical business it has spent ...

Microsoft finally reported an Azure revenue number, after years of various less-than-specific ways of describing cloud sales that elicited complaints from analysts, investors, reporters &even a post-MSFT Steve Ballmer bloomberg.com/news/article... by @mattmday.bsky.social @brodyford.bsky.social

this is...an incredible document. Thank you.

A chart "Microsoft's capital spending hits records on AI boom" $2, $3, $4 billion a quarter for 2018, bit more in 2019, 2020, starts going bonkers in 2021, all the way up to $30 billion+ in Q1 2026.

wheeeeeeeeeeee
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

we are driving and riding a series of compounding s-curves

Microsoft Gives Azure Cloud Sales for First Time at $75 Billion Microsoft Corp. said its Azure cloud-computing unit generated more than $75 billion during the 2025 fiscal year, the first time the company has put a dollar figure on a critical business it has spent ...

Microsoft has decided to end one of the tech industry's silliest parlor games: Lets guess how much money Azure makes.

Azure made $75,000,000,000 (+) in the year ended in June. New w/ @brodyford.bsky.social: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

the KARPOWERSHIP logo

All-timer of a company name. Does what it says on the box!
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Seattle Is the New Hot Spot for Space Companies Hi all, it’s Matt in Seattle, home of Amazon, Microsoft and an increasingly buzzy space scene. But first ...

Well look at that, Seattle boasts a commercial space boomlet: www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

Microsoft’s Access to OpenAI Tech Is Focus of Contract Talks Microsoft Corp. is in advanced talks to land a deal that could give it ongoing access to critical OpenAI technology, an agreement that would remove a major obstacle to the startup’s efforts to become ...

Microsoft and OpenAI are making strides in talks that would clear the way for the startup to restructure (and raise a lot more $).

Key to the progress, we hear: Microsoft's increasing comfort that it won't find itself suddenly cut off from OAI's tech: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Microsoft’s Copilot Will Browse the Web With You in New Update Microsoft Corp. is embedding the Copilot AI assistant deeper into its browser, betting that users will find the service helpful when sorting through information and navigating the web.

Microsoft Edge: Now with more AI browsing. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Microsoft Probing If Chinese Hackers Learned of Flaws Via Alert Microsoft Corp. is investigating whether a leak from its early alert system for cybersecurity companies allowed Chinese hackers to exploit flaws in its SharePoint service before they were patched, acc...

Microsoft gives security firms a 24-hour head start in patching vulnerabilities, telling trusted companies first before widely sharing a new fix.

Hackers attacked SharePoint users July 7, the day before Microsoft publicly released a patch designed to fix the issue: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

AI Competition Pushes Some to Areas They Didn’t Want to Go Welcome to Tech In Depth, our daily newsletter about the business of tech from Bloomberg’s journalists around the world. Today, Ellen Huet considers the effects of the competition for supremacy among ...

Pleased to announce that my AI has also passed the big test:
www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

How Hackers Targeted Microsoft in Global Cyberattack Hackers in recent weeks have exploited flaws in SharePoint, a document management system developed by Microsoft Corp., to try to steal sensitive data from hundreds of victims.

Security experts say the scale of the cyber-espionage campaign — as measured in the number of victims and the sensitivity of the compromised information — may not be fully understood for months or even years.

Here’s what to know

US Nuclear Weapons Agency Breached in Microsoft SharePoint Hack The US agency responsible for maintaining and designing the nation’s cache of nuclear weapons was among those breached by a hack of Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint document management software, according...

SCOOP: The US agency responsible for maintaining the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons was among those breached by hackers exploiting Microsoft’s SharePoint.

(🎁) www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Amazon has scooped up the maker of a wristband that records and transcribes the owner’s activities, using the info to make to-do lists, summarize conversations, etc:

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Microsoft Says Chinese Hackers Exploiting SharePoint Flaws Microsoft Corp. accused Chinese state-sponsored hackers of using flaws in its SharePoint document management software in a hacking campaign that has targeted businesses and government agencies around ...

"In a blog post on Tuesday, the tech giant identified two groups supported by the Chinese government, Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon, as leveraging flaws in SharePoint software." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

‘Daddy, police!’: New video shows masked ICE agents arrest father outside child’s school in Beaverton Newly published video provides insights into the immigration arrest of a chiropractor outside of his child’s Beaverton Montessori school.

“There is a baby in the car,” Khanbabazadeh said. “Is it hard to wait for three minutes?”

"Leon was granted political asylum in 1987 after surviving torture at the hands of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime, according to his granddaughter, Nataly, who asked that her surname not be used because she fears U.S. government retribution"

www.mcall.com/2025/07/18/l...

Amazon Cuts Jobs in Cloud Services Arm Amid Spiraling AI Costs Amazon.com Inc. is cutting jobs in its cloud-computing division, the latest big tech company to pare its headcount amid rising costs for artificial intelligence.

More layoffs at Amazon, this time in AWS: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Amazon’s Emissions Climbed 6% in 2024 on Data Center Buildout Amazon.com Inc.’s carbon emissions rose for the first time in three years in 2024, driven by data center construction and fuel consumption by its delivery providers.

Amazon's carbon emissions rose last year for the first time since 2021 on increased data center construction and fuel use by its delivery contractors: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Whole Lotta "great idea, matt!"
To the point it's not exactly trustworthy when I'm suggesting weird combos of food ingredients and it's applauding

They're in the mix!

Bloomberg News screenshot: Suleyman has said AI will eventually remake graphical interfaces like Windows. But for now, Microsoft executives are wary of alienating users by forcing them to learn new habits and tend to bolt AI innovations onto existing tools. When the company started rolling out an AI agent to help manage PCs last month, it wound up in Settings, not the Copilot app. There are technical challenges, too. The operating system only gets a few major updates a year and isn’t set up to receive frequent tweaks of the sort the Copilot team are rolling out.

(fixing alt text)

Microsoft's Copilot Is Getting Lapped by 900 Million ChatGPT Downloads Microsoft Corp. has spent billions of dollars to get people like Tyson Jominy using its Copilot, an artificially intelligent personal assistant designed to make it easier for consumers to navigate the...

read the rest here: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Bloomberg News screenshot: 'Shamontiel Vaughn, a writer and editor in Chicago, recently tried voice mode and was blown away that the software nailed the pronunciation of her name on the first go, something people almost never pull off. Then Copilot couldn’t answer her next question. “I was very impressed, then very unimpressed three seconds away,” she said. But Vaughn remains intrigued by Copilot, which she uses for research and the occasional bit of cooking advice after being prompted to try the software by its colorful swirl logo in Microsoft Edge. She’s got a wish list — the ability to make sense of scanned documents along with fine-grained control of image generation — for what’s become a helpful, if largely optional, tool. “It’s nice to have,” she said. “But I’m not going to lose my mind over it.”'

So team Copilot is putting a lot of emphasis on features designed to wow you on a smartphone: voice, a sometimes scary-good conversation bot, and vision, which can pop into your camera and chat about what it sees.

Will it make superfans of Microsoft's AI? TBD.

Bloomberg News screenshot: "Suleyman’s consumer Copilot, though developed atop the same AI models as its corporate cousin, was rebuilt from the ground up. It was a rocky transition. People who used Copilot as their default Android smartphone assistant, summoning it with the push of a button, lost that ability, meaning they’d have to use the app to interact with the software. App stores lit up with reviews from frustrated users who watched features like the ability to quickly edit AI-generated images disappear overnight. The company has reintroduced some features, but complaints of bugs — sudden ends to conversations, or cases where Copilot wiped conversations it was supposed to recall — persist."

A tough question for Microsoft is how to get the app in people’s hands.

Ten years ago they tried to bake an assistant into Windows that was so good people would demand it on smartphones. It didn’t take (RIP, Cortana).

So Microsoft has waffled a bit on where to place AI in Windows.

A (slightly pixely, sorry) screenshot from Inflection's Pi. "Good morning, Matt." Warm colors, artsy little icons with prompts that include Write better emails and Show your partner you care.

A Microsoft Copilot screenshot. "Ideas to explore" as heading text Warm tones. More artsy little squares with rounded corners prompting you to "Make every meal a planet-friendly choice" or "Beat language barriers with savvy travel tips."

When it relaunched last fall, Copilot looked an awful lot like Pi from Inflection, the startup whose brain trust Microsoft poached to run its consumer AI efforts.