What's up: Intel to lay of 15% of workers; Chinese hackers chalk up another win with Sharepoint hack; Behind the Bylines: The WSJ's Belle Lin on that big AI event in D.C.

Good morning. Once upon a time the combined force of Microsoft and Intel—or "Wintel"—dominated the PC market and business technology.

But then came the Apple iPhone and ARM chips, the cloud, Nvidia with its GPUs and finally... ChatGPT. 

Memos released by the chief executives of both companies Thursday revealed how much their paths have diverged since.

“There are no more blank checks,” Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan wrote in a memo to staff. “Every investment must make economic sense.”

The chipmaker said it would cut 15% of its workforce and scrap plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on new chip facilities as it raced to refocus on the AI chips market. 

Microsoft's Satya Nadella was a bit more philosophical, his memo pondering "The enigma of success”—not a Depeche Mode B-side, but the phenomenon of "being recognized and rewarded at levels never seen before" while simultaneously experiencing layoffs.

“Progress isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding,” he wrote. “But it’s also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before.”

The backstory to the memos. Microsoft had the foresight to move beyond its cash cow, Windows. It missed mobile and social, but it was able to ride the waves of what came next, in part because of Nadella's embrace of a more open approach.

Intel, focused perhaps a bit too much on the short term high of its data center business, failed to anticipate the boom in demand for the powerful chips used to develop AI models. In this fast-moving tech landscape, missing so much as one product cycle at the wrong time can kill you. Read the story.

Failed Microsoft security patch is latest win for Chinese hackers. A hack that involved several versions of Microsoft’s SharePoint software has spurred renewed criticism that the company has failed to give priority to cybersecurity, WSJ's Robert McMillan reports.

Microsoft released patches for a pair of SharePoint bugs earlier this month, but the fixes were quickly bypassed, allowing China-linked hackers to break into hundreds of organizations, according to security researchers.

As of Wednesday, researchers said more than 400 SharePoint servers had been hacked—many of them belonging to government entities.

Laptop farmer sentenced. American Christina Chapman was sentenced to 8½ years in prison by a federal judge for operating a “laptop farm” that North Korean scammers used to connect remotely to more than 300 U.S. companies, WSJ reports. Among the companies that the North Koreans—who were working on behalf of their cash-strapped government—infiltrated was Nike, according to court filings.