Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer, speaks during an event at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on Feb. 7, 2023.
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Microsoft on Thursday said keyboards on upcoming Windows PCs will feature a Copilot key for having text conversations with the software maker’s virtual assistant. It’s one of the most prominent additions to the Windows keyboard since the 1994 introduction of the Windows key for viewing the Start menu.
Copilot in Windows taps artificial intelligence models from Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI, which operates its own popular ChatGPT chatbot. It can compose human-like text in response to a few words of written input. People can tell it to write out emails, answer questions, create images and turn on PC features. Workers in businesses that pay for Copilot for Microsoft 365 can receive highlights of Teams chats and get help with writing Word documents.
Microsoft has started delivering Copilot on PCs with Windows 10, the world’s most popular operating system, and Windows 11. People can hold down the Windows key and push the C key to summon the Copilot.
Now it’s getting a dedicated key.
Although Windows isn’t the juggernaut it used to be, Microsoft still derives about 10% of its revenue from the operating system, so anything it can do to spur a wave of PC upgrades could lead to a revenue bump. Companies such as Dell and HP are looking to sell replacements to the PCs that consumers, students and corporate workers bought during the Covid-19 pandemic. The technology industry has agreed on a term called the AI PC, which often means having special chip components inside devices to run computationally demanding models more efficiently than standard silicon.
Enhancements to Windows, PCs and at the chip level will make 2024 “the year of the AI PC,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of Windows and Surface, wrote in a blog post.
Device makers will show off PCs with the Copilot key leading up to the CES conference in Las Vegas next week, ahead of availability starting later this month. The new key will appear on forthcoming Microsoft Surface PCs, Mehdi wrote.
In some cases, the Copilot key will replace the Menu key or the right Control key, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email. Some larger computers will have enough room for both the Copilot key and the right Control key, the spokesperson said.
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
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LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.
The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.
“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.
He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.
Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.
“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”
Undecided on location
Founded in 2022 by Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup that competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
The company divides its business into three main camps: consumer-facing voice assistants, integrations with corporates such as Cisco, and tailor-made applications for specific industries like health care.
Staniszewski said the firm hasn’t yet decided where it could list, but that this decision will largely rest on where most of its users are located at the time.
“If the U.K. is able to start accelerating,” ElevenLabs will consider London as a listing destination, Staniszewski said.
The city has faced criticisms from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that its stock market is unfavorable toward high-growth tech firms.
Meanwhile, British money transfer firm Wiselast month said it plans to move its primary listing location to the U.S.,
Fundraising plans
ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.
Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
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Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.