Microsoft is about to launch its new Xbox Nano controller tomorrow, and the tiny device has a little secret. The Nano can connect directly to Xbox Cloud Gaming over Wi-Fi to improve latency. It's a feature Microsoft hasn't officially announced yet, but one I've been anticipating since the Xbox Nano leaked earlier this year.
The Nano will be able to connect directly to Microsoft's cloud servers to reduce latency, much like how Google's Stadia controllers used to work. This new cloud connect feature for the Nano is being privately tested on the new Xbox Cloud Gaming website, and it will require you to pair the controller over Wi-Fi to Microso …
SUSE plans to cut roughly 10% of its 1,900-person workforce, with CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen saying "automation and AI" are reducing the need for some roles and allowing the open source software company to operate with less overhead and flatter management structures. "We are announcing a reduction of SUSE's global workforce of approximately 10 percent," said Van Leeuwen in an email. "These decisions are painful for our people, our culture, and our open source community, but they are necessary for us to adapt and build a sustainable, resilient SUSE for the long term." The Register reports: Van Leeuwen says the business, bought by Swedish private equity provider EQT, decided to cut jobs after scrutinizing its "future strategy, required capabilities, and team structures." The rest of the organization will get a look at the fiscal year 2027 strategy on November 16. He said in the message to staff: "What is clear is that automation and AI are fundamentally shifting how software companies operate. AI capabilities are advancing exponentially, forcing us to radically reimagine our work. We have seen this trend already both inside our sector and in the wider economy. This means that the organizational design and cost base that SUSE is built on today will not carry us forward successfully.
"We are adapting. Across SUSE, modern tooling is already changing our daily workflows, enabling teams to move faster with less operational overhead and flatter reporting lines. The requirement for some existing roles has greatly diminished. Other roles will evolve over the next few years. This means we are accelerating investments in high priority areas, and deprioritizing others. These are hard, painful decisions to make, but necessary for our future."
[...] The specific roles at risk of redundancy were not outlined but SUSE claims it has considered where the people in those positions are "able to evolve, what they can stop doing, what they need to do more of - and decisions have been made on that basis." Staff caught up in the redundancies will be informed by November 4, employee representatives nominated the following day, and one to one meetings will begin at the start of next week. Van Leeuwen says in the internal memo that the job cuts are a "reflection of shifting organizational needs, not your talent or commitment. You have tackled hard infrastructure and open source challenges that power critical enterprise systems around the world. "Any organization will be fortunate to have your expertise."
Microsoft’s Dona Sarkar (left) looks on as members of the FROM YOUR EYES team hoist the trophy after winning the 2024 Imagine Cup at Microsoft Build in Seattle. The competition is expanding beyond students for the first time in 2027. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, a competition for student developers since 2003, is expanding for the first time to early-stage startups whose founders aren’t in school, with $250,000 in cash and $1 million in cloud credits awarded to the winner.
The change, announced Monday, opens the competition to companies founded in the past two years that haven’t raised a Series C round, whether or not their founders are students.
Startups will compete in six industry categories, including cybersecurity, developer tools and healthcare. Students will get a seventh category of their own, with a $25,000 top prize, or they can choose to compete for the main prize in the industry categories.
It’s the latest step in a broader evolution of the Imagine Cup, and the implications go beyond the competition itself. Changes in the rules from 2024 to 2027 show how Microsoft and the tech industry are adjusting, year by year, to the realities of the AI era.
Changing AI requirements: The clearest example is the Imagine Cup rules for AI usage. In 2024, entrants had to build their products with “Microsoft and/or OpenAI” services. In 2025, they had to use at least one Microsoft AI service. In 2026, they had to use at least two Microsoft AI services.
For 2027, they can use any AI they want, as long as they use Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
The shift mirrors a broader change in Microsoft’s AI strategy. The company has added models from Anthropic, xAI, Meta and others to Azure. In April it ended its exclusive cloud arrangement with its longtime AI partner OpenAI, allowing the ChatGPT maker to sell its technology through other platforms such as Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft Foundry, the company’s platform for building AI applications, offers access to more than 11,000 models.
Tom Davis, general manager of Microsoft for Startups. (Microsoft Photo)
“Imagine Cup 2027 reflects that same approach, giving founders the flexibility to choose the right models and technologies for their solutions while meeting the competition’s Azure and technical requirements,” said Tom Davis, general manager of Microsoft for Startups, in a statement responding to GeekWire’s questions.
Why startups: Addressing the expansion to non-student startups, Davis said AI is letting more founders start companies faster than ever, and the revamped competition is meant to help those young companies win customers and prepare to sell to big businesses.
The judging criteria have changed to match that focus on business customers.
As recently as 2024, student teams couldn’t have raised more than $50,000 in outside funding to compete. Under the new rules, final-round judges, whose scores determine all of the winners, will look for net revenue retention over the previous 12 months, six months of traction data, and a customer reference willing to be contacted.
What’s in it for Microsoft: The change is also a way for Microsoft to bring promising startups onto Azure. For startups in the industry categories, the first-round scoring criteria in 2027 will include “Microsoft and Azure commercial readiness, and expected cloud and AI consumption.”
Azure gets less explicit weight in the final round, whose scores determine the winners. A live production workload on Azure is worth 6 of 100 points there. In 2026, use of Microsoft technology made up 40% of the score in every round.
Participants can also earn Azure credits by using more of Microsoft’s cloud services. The credits start at $1,000 and rise to as much as $150,000 for startups that run at least 10 eligible Azure workloads and spend $3,000 a month on Azure for 60 days.
Amazon and Google run their own credit programs for startups, as the cloud giants compete to win AI companies early, when they’re choosing where to build.
Diversity criteria dropped: The new rules also drop diversity, inclusion and accessibility from the judging criteria, where they had been through 2026. In 2024, inclusion was worth 10% of the score, with judges asked to consider factors such as gender, ethnicity and disability.
Davis said Microsoft “updated the judging framework to reflect the range of industries and customer challenges represented in the competition,” and that inclusion and accessibility remain central to the company’s mission. He added that the competition welcomes startups developing products focused on inclusion and accessibility.
Prizes and timing: Applications are due Feb. 28. The second-place startup will receive $50,000 and $350,000 in credits, and third place gets $25,000 and $350,000 in credits. The 2026 champion, CopyFlag, a U.K. startup that tracks copies of creators’ designs online, won $150,000.
The top startup in the student category will present at the World Championship but isn’t eligible for the top three prizes, according to the official rules. To compete for those top prizes, student startups can enter an industry category instead, going up against companies that may have raised as much as a Series B.
The rules also allow Microsoft to use “automated assistance” to triage, summarize and compare entries, with human review in advancement decisions.
Winners will be selected in April and announced in May or June at a World Championship, with the date and location still to be determined, Davis said. The 2026 finale was at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in San Francisco.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) reported today that they used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra language model to raise a small, open source Qwen model's math score roughly sixfold by directly editing its weights -- the numerical parameters that govern its behavior. Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang and Omar Khattab described their work in a research blog post published November 2. They call the approach "weight-space programming" and tested Astra's ability to interpret and alter networks without using conventional training procedures to generate the edits.
In the strongest language-model example, Astra's intervention raised Qwen3.5-0.8B's MATH-500 score from 7.9% to 48.1% while touching approximately 0.016% of its weights. The improvement came primarily from correcting repetitive reasoning—a distinction that shaped both the technical findings and the debate over their implications. Their experiments explored a broader possibility: AI systems that inspect, repair and construct other neural networks by working directly on their internal machinery. "This is cool as heck!" wrote Yuchen Jin, a technical staffer at Databricks and former co-founder and CTO of Hyperbolic Labs who was unaffiliated with the research, on X. "Imagine using a large LLM to directly edit a smaller model's weights and dramatically improve its capabilities. It's like gene editing for neural networks. Even cooler than distillation!"
Voyage AI staff researcher Chandan Singh, formerly of Microsoft AI, also reacted to the findings: "For anyone questioning whether this post is overhyped, I think they are actually *underselling* the approach."
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