Microsoft is retiring Teams’ Together ModeMicrosoft launched Teams’ Together Mode during the pandemic to give the illusion of a bunch of people sitting in a conference room together, even if they were really sitting at home without pants on. But times have changed, and it’s now being retired in favor of a more simplified Teams experience. The feature used AI to cut your head and shoulds out, and place you in a virtual space with others in the meeting. It could definitely feel gimmicky — especially when you’d tap co-workers on the shoulder, or give virtual high fives — but it did limit visual distractions.
The changes are being rolled out gradually, but as they are, the Together Mode toggle will disappear from the view menu. And Together-specific features, such as scenes and seat assignments, will go along with it. Part of the reasoning, according to Microsoft, is to reduce fragmentation across various platforms. But it also cites a streamlined interface with fewer options, less clicking, and less confusion. It also says this will allow the company to focus on improving video quality, stability, and performance.
#Microsoft #retiring #Teams #ModeMicrosoft,News,Tech
Microsoft launched Teams’ Together Mode during the pandemic to give the illusion of a bunch of people sitting in a conference room together, even if they were really sitting at home without pants on. But times have changed, and it’s now being retired in favor of a more simplified Teams experience. The feature used AI to cut your head and shoulds out, and place you in a virtual space with others in the meeting. It could definitely feel gimmicky — especially when you’d tap co-workers on the shoulder, or give virtual high fives — but it did limit visual distractions.
The changes are being rolled out gradually, but as they are, the Together Mode toggle will disappear from the view menu. And Together-specific features, such as scenes and seat assignments, will go along with it. Part of the reasoning, according to Microsoft, is to reduce fragmentation across various platforms. But it also cites a streamlined interface with fewer options, less clicking, and less confusion. It also says this will allow the company to focus on improving video quality, stability, and performance.
![If you’re giving a commencement speech in 2026, maybe don’t mention AI | TechCrunch
Commencement season has come around again — and this year, a couple speakers have discovered that it’s tough to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence.
Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we’re living in a time of “profound change,” which can be both “exciting” and “daunting.”
“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield declared — prompting the students in the audience to begin booing, getting louder and louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?”
“Okay, I struck a chord,” she said. Caulfield then tried to resume her speech, saying, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives” — only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time by their loud cheers and applause.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwYkHS8jvSE[/embed]
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response when he brought up AI at a University of Arizona speech on Friday.
In Schmidt’s case, the criticism actually began before the speech itself, with some student groups calling for him to be removed as commencement speaker due to a lawsuit in which a former girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) According to a local news report, the booing began even before Schmidt took the stage.
But Schmidt also got loud boos when he told students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The booing was persistent enough that Schmidt tried to speak over it, insisting, “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.”
To be fair, AI isn’t becoming a third rail at every graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement, and he didn’t seem to get any audible pushback when he said that AI has “reinvented computing.”
Still, it’s not exactly surprising to find some students in a booing mood. In a recent Gallup poll, only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it’s a good time to find a job locally, a steep drop from 75% in 2022.
That pessimism isn’t solely a response to the rise of AI (a shift that even tech industry workers are worried about), but journalist and tech industry critic Brian Merchant suggested that for many students, AI has become “the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism.”
“I too would loudly boo at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I was in my early twenties, unemployed, and had aspirations for my future greater than entering prompts into an LLM,” Merchant wrote.
Even when graduation speeches didn’t mention AI explicitly, “resilience” was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself acknowledged that there is “a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”
Caulfield, meanwhile, might also have misread her audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student said that before mentioning AI, Caulfield already started to lose them with her “generic” praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos.
Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told The New York Times, “It wasn’t one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#youre #giving #commencement #speech #dont #mention #TechCrunchcommencement speeches,Eric Schmidt,gloria caulfield](https://i3.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/university.jpg?resize=1200%2C641&ssl=1 "If you’re giving a commencement speech in 2026, maybe don’t mention AI | TechCrunch
Commencement season has come around again — and this year, a couple speakers have discovered that it’s tough to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence.
Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we’re living in a time of “profound change,” which can be both “exciting” and “daunting.”
“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield declared — prompting the students in the audience to begin booing, getting louder and louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?”
“Okay, I struck a chord,” she said. Caulfield then tried to resume her speech, saying, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives” — only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time by their loud cheers and applause.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwYkHS8jvSE[/embed]
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response when he brought up AI at a University of Arizona speech on Friday.
In Schmidt’s case, the criticism actually began before the speech itself, with some student groups calling for him to be removed as commencement speaker due to a lawsuit in which a former girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) According to a local news report, the booing began even before Schmidt took the stage.
But Schmidt also got loud boos when he told students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The booing was persistent enough that Schmidt tried to speak over it, insisting, “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.”
To be fair, AI isn’t becoming a third rail at every graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement, and he didn’t seem to get any audible pushback when he said that AI has “reinvented computing.”
Still, it’s not exactly surprising to find some students in a booing mood. In a recent Gallup poll, only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it’s a good time to find a job locally, a steep drop from 75% in 2022.
That pessimism isn’t solely a response to the rise of AI (a shift that even tech industry workers are worried about), but journalist and tech industry critic Brian Merchant suggested that for many students, AI has become “the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism.”
“I too would loudly boo at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I was in my early twenties, unemployed, and had aspirations for my future greater than entering prompts into an LLM,” Merchant wrote.
Even when graduation speeches didn’t mention AI explicitly, “resilience” was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself acknowledged that there is “a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”
Caulfield, meanwhile, might also have misread her audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student said that before mentioning AI, Caulfield already started to lose them with her “generic” praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos.
Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told The New York Times, “It wasn’t one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#youre #giving #commencement #speech #dont #mention #TechCrunchcommencement speeches,Eric Schmidt,gloria caulfield")
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