Hey Copilot, what's the definition of ironic?

I'm not sure Microsoft Copilot would feed me this post from LinkedIn and Office EVP Ryan Roslansky, but maybe it should.

Earlier in the year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella bemoaned the term "AI slop" and hoped 2026 would be the year everyone started lying down and accepting AI as inevitable. So far, that hasn't happened. And what's worse, Microsoft's own senior employees seem increasingly annoyed by the tech.

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We've seen Xbox CEO Asha Sharma repeatedly use the phrase "AI slop" to describe subpar experiences like Microsoft's ill-fated "gaming Copilot," and LinkedIn itself deleted its "enhance with AI" post button, and replaced it with an "AI slop" report feature to try to boost the "quality" of its miserable, self-aggrandizing content algorithm.

Speaking of the hellscape that is LinkedIn, former CEO now Microsoft EVP Ryan Roslansky recently dropped this musing that I found to be particularly comical given what Microsoft has unleashed on the world.

Roslansky lamented, "AI slop isn't happening just on social networks ... it's happening in the day to day of work. Someone sent me what was clearly an AI generated doc. I read it, realized it was AI, had my AI summarize it, and ended up with nothing that brought new thinking to the idea ... This is a doom loop."

The phrase "no shit" comes to mind. Roslansky is speaking to a workplace irritation, but unwittingly touched on one of the AI industry's most self-destructive problems. One of the hilarious consequences of Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other content-theft platforms is that they're trained entirely stolen human-made content. AI data sets post 2023 are doomed to rely on cannibalizing AI-generated content, creating an incestuous data "doom loop" Roslansky spoke of here. Researchers have described this as "model collapse" previously, as human content creators get put out of business by Google's AI summary box. Reddit is reportedly thinking of cancelling its AI training contracts with Google, after realizing that Google's content theft engines are killing Reddit's entire business. Reddit recently blocked ChatGPT from accessing its content, as the platform seeks to insulate its business from theft.

"If we're not careful, we'll end up with a very expensive way to avoid writing and reading in an ocean of sameness, genericness ... Let's not do that." Roslansky pleads, "Let's go another way where AI helps us to do things, to learn things, to create things, but in ways that we enhance and advance with our distinct perspectives and unique experiences!"

Lol. Lmao even.

The post was liked by Microsoft President Brad Smith, who I've noticed has been desperately trying to whitewash Microsoft's data center expansionism across his own LinkedIn recently. Microsoft, unlike other big tech firms, seems far more concerned with how badly AI is battering its public image. Microsoft's data centers are increasingly dealing with protests across the world. The destruction of local communities is uniting regular folk across the political spectrum in ways we haven't seen in years.

Microsoft unleashed this mess. Perhaps take some responsibility?

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has been instrumental in turning around Microsoft's gaming brand in recent months, boosting perception of the platform with a flurry of consumer-friendly features and promises. It doesn't seem like other Microsoft departments got the memo, yet.

Linux adoption among consumers is gradually increasing, as gamers, tech enthusiasts, and even nation states seek to escape Microsoft's poor handling of Windows. AI buttons everywhere, unwanted bloatware, poor performance, and a collapse in trust has made Windows look more vulnerable than ever — and competitors are lining up to take advantage.

Microsoft is the undisputed monarch of AI slop. Watching its execs cry about the technology they themselves foisted on the world is a master class in obliviousness and responsibility avoidance. Microsoft isn't fooling anyone, except perhaps themselves, and it's miserably sad.

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I got into this business inspired by the innovations Microsoft was exploring a decade ago. Microsoft led cloud convenience and digital platform synergy, its hardware innovations across Surface even gave Apple pause. But it has become consumed by AI psychosis in recent years, and while shareholders are undoubtedly happy, consumers in Microsoft's "legacy" business are looking for the exit.

Whether it's data centers destroying local communities, AI bull cluttering up Windows, or Microsoft's harvesting of tech components blowing up consumer prices ... perhaps Microsoft's senior execs need to read the room, sit down, and take some responsibility for the chaos they've unleashed on the world.

A crazy idea — that didn't require any input from AI, by the way.

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The big AI era isn't going as some might've hoped.

OpenAI and other big companies are losing billions chasing artificial intelligence technology, and it's only clever accounting and circular investments keeping the entire industry afloat. OpenAI specifically is in hot water, with spending commitments through to 2030 coming scarily close to $1 trillion dollars, and is operating purely on the basis of handouts from the likes of SoftBank, NVIDIA, Oracle, and Microsoft. OpenAI is looking to spend $50 billion in compute alone in 2026 on roughly $25~ billion in revenue, revenue which is also made up at least in part with IOUs.

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Despite the scary numbers, OpenAI is trucking along on faith and fumes alone, as companies' belief in the tech keeps the firm alive, for now.

Yet, even Sam Altman is having doubts about the impact of large language models. In a new podcast, Altman lamented "economic inertia" for the lack of adoption, and also called out the AI industry for making the tech seem "scary."

"A lot of the people building AI have been off saying there's a 25% chance we're going to destroy the world ..."

Altman effectively blamed those pesky humans for not adopting ChatGPT and other AI products, lamenting that "people keep using their tools in the same way" they had previously been using them.

"I thought when we got to [ChatGPT]-4, which was back in 2023, I thought very quickly after that there'd be much more disruption, with the software business up for grabs right away. I was wrong about a few things, one of them, in terms of the speed ... the economy just has so much inertia. People keep doing the same things they're doing, they keep buying from the same company, they keep wanting to use their tools in the same way ..."

Altman implied that the "slow" pace of change would make the "transition" to AI "smoother." Elsewhere in the podcast, Sam Altman remarked that AI leaders had "not done a very good job" explaining AI tech, referring to the broad backlash to the technology.

"I also think a lot of the people building AI have been off saying there's a 25% chance we're going to destroy the world ... and yeah, we're going to race ahead and do it because otherwise those bad guys will do it first. Or it's like, 'man, this thing is going to be really terrible, and 50% of the jobs are going to go away in the next year, and we hope you are all okay,' but it seems really scary.

We have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated. We certainly have not done a good job ... even if people have had answers like, 'well, there's going to be universal basic income, or work will be optional', or whatever. There's been very little discussion from people about how and why it's important that people have more power and freedom in the world, not less."

My take: Altman just doesn't get it

I think the key issue with this AI tech is that most people just don't find it very useful. I work in an industry that, at least on paper, should benefit from some kind of automagical writing tool. The problem is that it loses so much nuance and accuracy that, even if I wanted to use it for work, I literally can't.

I think a lot of these very technical, mathematically-inclined dudebros pushing this format have little knowledge or understanding about how and where this technology should be applied. Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, gaming platforms, and other services are actively trying to filter out AI content, as it is repeatedly proven to decrease engagement — users actively hate it. Companies that are using tokens to try to boost productivity are finding that they're actually just boosting costs, and that they're simply finding a new bottleneck in the finite amount of addressable customers.

LLMs undoubtedly have uses, but when 90% of the compute is being spent on utterly unproductive use cases, the economics simply seem primed to implode. If you're spending tokens for the sake of spending tokens, and it doesn't lead to any discernible increase in sales — what is the point? You could use AI to make hundreds of slop video games, but people already have more than enough to play built by an ironically more affordable human workforce.

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In the future, I think we'll find AI probably ends up as a tool of governments in things like law enforcement and medical fields. Specific industries will benefit from tools that can parse and summarize large, complex data sets, albeit with the unfortunate knowledge of LLMs' penchant for hallucinations and outright lies. Just yesterday I asked Copilot to find some links to some old Windows Central articles I did. It just straight up lied and gave me some completely made-up links instead. Extrapolate these simple mistakes to medical fields or military applications, where lives are literally at stake ... is it worth the risk?

Perhaps the issue is that AI's inaccuracy renders it only viable in low-stakes businesses ... and those low-stakes businesses simply won't see a real return over doing things the "old way," which Altman describes as economic "inertia."

Perhaps it's not inertia. Perhaps the AI business model is just not the disruptor it was cracked up to be.

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Less than one year after being launched in preview and before leaving testing, the COPILOT function in Excel is going away. The function never shipped to general availability, but it could be used by Frontier and Insider users since August 2025.

The COPILOT function allowed users to use natural language to place prompts into spreadsheets. For example, you could use it to summarize text or categorize feedback. The function could also look up information from the web.

While useful, the function had serious limits. Microsoft stated that people should not use the COPILOT function for numerical calculations, responses that require context from other parts of a workbook, or any tasks with "legal, regulatory or compliance implications."

Considering how many people use Excel for important work and calculations, those limits are quite restrictive.

Microsoft's explanation of why the feature is going away lacks details. Instead, it primarily focuses on the fact that Copilot in Excel is still available in the side pane:

"Beginning September 14, 2026, the =COPILOT function in Microsoft Excel will no longer be available. This function is currently offered as a preview feature through the Insider and Frontier programs.

Customers can continue using Copilot in Excel through the Copilot side pane, which provides many of the same AI-powered capabilities, including summarizing text, classifying data, generating content, and retrieving information from the web. This change helps streamline the Copilot experience within Excel while continuing to provide AI assistance through a supported interface."

Users will not be able to create new formulas using the COPILOT function after September 14, 2026.

Windows Central take

It appears Microsoft may be reining in Copilot a bit. The AI tool is still part of the company's plans, but in a more controlled manner.

Microsoft has a unified Copilot experience that merges Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot. We've also seen some Copilot features go away or be limited over the last few months.

Earlier this summer I argued that the free version of Copilot is starting to feel like a tech demo designed to push paid tiers. I still think that's the case, but if Microsoft is going to push Copilot, it's best to do so with a plan.

Since the launch of Copilot, it's felt like Microsoft threw everything at the wall to see what sticks. The Copilot brand was diluted and there were dozens of different apps with Copilot in the name. Anything even remotely related to AI was attached to Copilot in some way, making the term almost meaningless.

Whether it's because Microsoft decided that strategy was a mistake or it's just had enough time to assess what properly stuck, the next wave of Copilot feels more targeted.

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When does a bug become a feature? Microsoft needs to answer that question now that classic Outlook may hide the Copilot button and stop other Copilot features from working.

A bug that appears with build 20026.20182 of classic Outlook prevents access to Copilot Chat and removes Copilot entry points within the app.

"After classic Outlook for Windows updates to build 20026.20182 and higher, you no longer have Copilot Chat or Copilot entry points in Outlook," reads a Microsoft support document. "This issue happens if you have a Copilot Chat (Basic) license or a paid M365 Copilot (Premium) account."

While it's easy to joke about Copilot going missing being "addition by subtraction," the bug is likely frustrating for those that rely on Copilot within classic Outlook.

If your system is affected by the bug, the Copilot button could be missing from the top-right area above the ribbon. The Copilot icon can also go missing in the left app bar or the More Apps area.

Even if you see the Copilot icon in the Add Apps section, selecting "Open" may not do anything at all. Even if you've added Copilot through ribbon customization, the option may appear grayed out or unavailable.

Only classic Outlook is affected, meaning Copilot still appears and works as usual within the web version of Outlook and other versions. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app and web experience are also working normally, though it's worth noting Microsoft has a new unified Copilot experience rolling out.

If you need to use Copilot immediately, Microsoft suggests switching to Outlook on the web or the new Outlook app. While standard fixes like creating a new Outlook profile, clearing local cache data, re-signing into Office, or restarting Windows have been tried, Microsoft notes they don't consistently restore the missing buttons.

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I have several PCs in my office that are capable of running Copilot+ tools in Windows 11, but there's one feature I've stayed away from: Windows Recall.

Why? I don't particularly like the idea of AI snapshotting what I do on my PC and making it searchable, even if it promises to never let the data leave my local system. I'm sure it's handy for some users, but I've yet to come across a scenario where I wish I had it enabled.

If you're of the opposite opinion and happen to use macOS, I have good news. OpenAI today announced "ChatGPT Computer History" for its macOS app.

What is ChatGPT Computer History?

It's tough not to immediately begin comparing Computer History to Windows 11's Copilot+ Recall feature.

Here's a blurb from the ChatGPT press release about how it works:

Yeah, that sounds like the same thing. But let me explain ChatGPT's version a bit more.

Computer History, according to ChatGPT's website, is completely optional and turned off by default for Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers.

Rather than collecting screenshots every so often to keep track of your doings, Computer History "records interaction events and does not capture your screen or audio." It's basically its own little keylogger, keeping tabs on clicks, typing, app switching, shortcuts, and more.

The data it records is searchable, and you can interact with Computer History the same way you interact with any AI, asking it regular language questions.

The data that Computer History gathers is saved locally on your Mac, but it does get sent to OpenAI's cloud servers in order to turn it into memories. These memories are then sent back to your Mac for local storage.

OpenAI says it does not keep this data on its servers unless required by law, and it does not use the data for training.

Is Computer History different enough from Recall to avoid similar backlash?

The reaction to ChatGPT's Computer History announcement is surely mixed. It seems like there are just as many people worrying about massive privacy and surveillance issues as there are people wondering if they should go out and buy a Mac.

Windows Recall faced the same adversity when it was announced as a default feature, with no opt-in available. The pushback was so bad that Microsoft delayed its launch by almost a year in order to address security issues. It officially released in April 2025 as an opt-in feature, but I know that many Windows users are still wary of its abilities.

The fact that ChatGPT is making its Computer History opt-in from the start tells me it learned from Microsoft's mistakes. There's also the fact that it doesn't take screenshots, making it feel less like routine spying.

That doesn't mean there aren't inherent risks to using something like Recall on Windows or Computer History on macOS.

It's clearly noted in OpenAI's Computer History documentation that the feature does not encrypt your information, and that it can be accessible to other apps running on macOS.

Like Recall, there are also serious prompt injection risks. Because these AI-powered features can essentially see what you're doing, they can be tricked with text. You might visit a seemingly innocuous website, only to realize later that it contained hidden instructions aimed at AI that made it do something unsavory.

Windows Central's take

Some of us here at Windows Central use Windows 11's Recall feature. Others don't. I'm in the latter camp, but one day that might change.

Why? It feels like there's a definite push going on with AI assistants that can remember everything you do, and it's not just ChatGPT and Microsoft. I've spent time with Lenovo's Qira cross-device ambient assistant, and I've written about HP IQ.

Although I shudder at the privacy implications of these tools gone wrong, they definitely seem like one strong fork in the future of computing. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, and ultimately to see how macOS users react to something that made Windows users go ballistic.

What do you think about ChatGPT's Computer History? Is it Recall with a different name? Is ChatGPT approaching the tool properly with opt-in-only settings and no screenshotting? Is it something you'd use on Windows 11? Let me know in the comments section below!

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Back in May, Microsoft confirmed that it was working on a Copilot super app that would merge the different consumer Copilot and productivity Copilot experiences under one app. Until now, Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot have been targeted at different users, but starting today those apps are being merged into one.

"We're updating Copilot to create a simpler, more cohesive experience for everyone," a new Microsoft Support document says. "Depending on the account and device you use, you will see changes to the Copilot app including changes to appearance and functionality, such as navigation, feature availability, or sign-in experience."

The unified Copilot experience begins its rollout today, but not everyone will see it right away. Microsoft says the experience will land on mobile first, with the unified Copilot on Windows and macOS being an opt-in experience at first, made available over the coming weeks.

The rollout should make it easier to move between using Copilot as an AI assistant for personal matters and using Copilot for productivity based tasks. For most people, not much will change with the unified app, which will simply appear as "Copilot" now. With that said, Microsoft does say that some features are going away with the unification. Those features include:

• Group Chat
  • All group chat threads, messages, and images will not carry forward after August 18, 2026.
  • Users must manually copy or download anything they want to keep.
• Podcasts
  • The Podcasts feature is being fully retired on August 18, 2026.
  • Users will no longer be able to create or access podcasts in Copilot after this date.
  • Individual podcast files can still be downloaded before retirement.
• Deep Research
  • Deep Research is being retired for consumer users starting August 18, 2026.
  • Existing Deep Research content will remain accessible, but the feature itself will no longer be available.

For those using Copilot with a work or school account, Microsoft says the unified Copilot app is also coming to those accounts too. The personal and commercial accounts will be separated within the app, meaning data from your work or school account won't be shared with your personal account, and vice versa. "Work and personal accounts remain separate. Your organization's security, privacy, compliance, and administrative controls continue to apply when you use Copilot with your work or school account."

For those using the personal consumer Copilot app, you will notice an updated UI that more similarly matches the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Those who use the Microsoft 365 Copilot app likely won't notice much of a difference, outside of the rebranded app to just "Copilot," along with a slightly updated logo.

For those curious, this is the new Microsoft Copilot icon and branding. Can you tell the difference? No, us neither.

Lastly, Microsoft has confirmed that all your Copilot data (except for the features that are being taken away) will migrate automatically to the new experience, meaning users won't need to do anything to ensure their chats and data are carried forward. All of that will happen automatically when the unified app lands on your device.

The unified Copilot experience begins its rollout today, though it's happening in waves so most users won't see the changes right away. Worldwide rollout for the mobile starts today, with rollout for Windows and macOS expected to start in mid September. Here's the full rollout schedule:

• Mid‑August 2026 — Worldwide rollout begins for mobile and web apps; early‑access opt‑in opens for Windows and Mac apps; copilot.cloud.microsoft URL available in Frontier for testing.
• Late August 2026 — Standard rollout of the URL redirect begins.
• Mid‑September 2026 — Worldwide rollout begins for Windows and Mac apps.
• Late September 2026 — Deferred rollout of the URL redirect begins for the web app.

Microsoft's unification of Copilot is a long time coming, and one that is setting the company up to deliver a Copilot super app experience that can do everything across Microsoft's platforms and services. It never made sense for Microsoft to split Copilot up between consumer- and productivity-based use cases, especially since users commonly want to do both.

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Twitch has another backlash on its hands, this time for forcibly opting-in all of its users to wanton content theft.

Twitch is a generally awful platform. The business has been a major drag on Amazon's bottom line since they acquired the brand losing billions of dollars year in, year out. Amazon has simply been unable to figure out how to adequately monetize the platform in a video streaming universe dominated by YouTube and Google ads, but its treatment of its userbase and content creators has hardly helped.

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Indeed, Twitch is facing another backlash right now for forcibly opting users into "ai training." Now, when you stream on Twitch, by default your likeness, content, voice, and other interactions will be used to train Amazon's AI stuff, in a move nobody could've seen coming.

they know we don't want it. they do not care.

— @witchytq.bsky.social (@witchytq.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-08-12T22:25:50.671Z

Responding to the backlash, Twitch Chief Product Officer Mike Minton admitted that they knew everyone hates it, but they don't care.

"Why is not opt-in?" Minton responded, acknowledging Twitch's very angry chat during a live stream this past week. "I get it ... let me opt-in vs. making me opt out. The honest answer, and I think most of you can probably appreciate this ... if it was opt-in, nobody would opt-in. That's honestly the answer. It's gonna' be on by default."

You can opt out of Twitch's AI content theft machine by going to settings, security and privacy, then toggling off "training for generative AI."

The entire tech world seems steeped in AI psychosis right now, expecting us plebians to just sit down and take generative slop and its painfully useless and forced "features" flooding into every corner of the web. AI Nutjob-In-Chief Sam Altman recently was fried alive on X (Twitter) for suggesting parents use ChatGPT to generate podcasts for their kids, rather than simply ... yanno, talk to them.

The latest Twitch backlash is just another long list in self-defeating stuff the platform has implemented over the last few years. For what it's worth, competitor YouTube does not give creators any control whatsoever over whether or not their content is used for training. Your content on YouTube is used automatically for Gemini's video training. Google only lets you opt-out of "third-party" training. At least Twitch is giving users an opt out ... which is something, I suppose.

As the tech world struggles to figure out how to make any of this AI stuff make sense, I suspect we'll see more dumb stuff emerge from the gaming universe, not less, in the near term.

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It seems like every time I turn around, there's another round of layoffs affecting video game studios.

In July, Xbox announced its biggest downsizing ever, cutting 3,200 jobs throughout 2026 and 2027. At the same time, Xbox made deals with four major studios to go independent or take on new management.

That independence didn't come without a cost either, as studio Double Fine Productions announced it was laying off 23 employees shortly after going solo.

It's all starting to feel like white noise with the same language. Streamlining. Restructuring. Focusing resources. Adapting to changing markets.

After reading an excellent report from Rest of World about the plight of small game developers in Turkey, I realized that the entire video game industry is likely in more trouble than most people realize.

While Microsoft and other big companies at the apex of the industry have been cutting thousands of jobs at the top, there's something just as disruptive going on at the bottom.

Solo developers are shipping full games with a tiny team, empowered by tools like Claude Code and Cowork, OpenAI Codex, and Copilot. This shift in how games are developed is eating up the entry-level jobs that used to serve as a way to break into the game dev industry. The candle is burning at both ends, as they say.

Turkey's AI game development example doesn't bode well

Over the last decade, Turkey has become a mobile gaming hotspot with more than 800 studios at its peak. It served as a pipeline for young developers who finished school, applied, got hired, worked in junior roles, and eventually made their way up the ladder.

This pipeline is no longer functioning as it should, and it's largely due to AI. One developer interviewed by Rest of World went from a huge studio pumping out a game per week to founding his own studio.

With Claude Code in his back pocket, the developer realized he needed just two employees to achieve similar productivity.

This shift in Turkey's game development scene is having dire effects. Entry-level jobs are understandably disappearing at smaller studios, and the larger studios are reticent to hire inexperienced developers.

The AI stack designed to make us more productive is killing key jobs

The AI stack negatively affecting one of the largest game development booms in European history is the same AI stack that Microsoft is racing to put in front of every developer, on every platform, including the ones building for Xbox and Windows.

Microsoft has famously spent years telling Windows users that Copilot will make us all more productive. But Turkey's example is likely a preview of what that means when followed to its logical end.

👉 "The 'AI Stigma' is real and severely punishes developers": A new study shows how much using AI in games hurts sales, and the numbers are hard to believe

Not a team of developers shipping games faster (OK, maybe a bit faster). One developer doing the job that used to require a team. Set this dilemma on top of a video game industry that just saw Xbox cut thousands of jobs, and the math really starts to hurt.

It's worth noting that Microsoft stated that AI is not being used to replace the most recent batch of laid-off employees at Xbox, but the company's overall massive spending on AI infrastructure and data centers has undoubtedly played a role in cuts to underperforming sectors like Xbox.

With layoffs at the top and an ever-shrinking front door at the bottom, the entire industry is being squeezed for all its juice.

Windows Central's take

The part that stuck with me the most is the plight of junior developers. A university director in Turkey is warning students not to follow the traditional path of getting hired on in an introductory position and working their way up. Instead, they should be building their own games while in school in order to land a job.

So, yes, AI tools definitely lower the barrier to creating a game. At the same time, however, AI tools do nothing to ensure that a game actually finds an audience.

Key steps in the nurturing and maturing of a video game developer are being skipped, and artists, writers, and programmers aren't necessarily getting the experience needed to compete at the upper levels of the industry.

Turkey's degrading video game development scene seems like a preview of what's to come for the rest of the industry, and I'm not sure I like it.

Are you a developer who uses Copilot, Claude, or any other AI tools in your workflow? Has it made you more ambitious? More productive? Are you more nervous now about who you're competing with? Let me know in the comments section below!

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It's the year of Linux, haven't you heard? You may as well pack up your PC, study your favorite distro, and get ready to evangelize the open-source platform that will run on all systems in the future.

Joking aside, Linux has grown a bit in popularity and Microsoft continues to embrace it. While the tech giant has several apps and projects on Linux, Microsoft has not released an official Copilot app for Linux.

Sure, you could use Copilot on the web. Heck, you could even open up Microsoft Edge for Linux and install Copilot as a PWA (Progressive Web App). But where is the fun in that?

Instead, you could install the unofficial Copilot app for Linux built by Hayden Barnes. The app opens the Copilot web app in a dedicated GTK window and keeps your login session safely on disk. It also integrates with the desktop for autostart, system downloads, app launcher execution, and accessing hardware permissions like the microphone.

Barnes shared the project on X alongside a link to the app's GitHub page.

Many of the unofficial Copilot app's features overlap with using the web version of Copilot since Microsoft's AI tool is the center of the experience. But building the unofficial app as a native GTK application means its developer can deeply integrate system shortcuts, allow it to run quietly in the system tray, and trigger native OS notifications as opposed to relying on browser notifications.

Other benefits include native support for desktop accent colors and system dark themes. Overall, the app looks and feels far more natural on a Linux desktop than a standard browser window, and keeping Copilot isolated prevents it from slowing down if your main browser gets bogged down with dozens of open tabs.

The unofficial Copilot app for Linux is new, so we'll have to use it for a while to determine its long-term stability and performance. The first publicly available release of the app shipped this week.

We have a few systems running Linux spread across our team, so we'll let you know how the unofficial Copilot app performs over time.

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Microsoft's stocks rallied this past week on accelerating AI growth, but the devil is always in the details.

Over the past month, Microsoft's shares have surged almost 30% following its quarterly filings, which beat Wall Street estimates by a significant margin. Microsoft proved that its AI business is accelerating in growth, and that cash flows remain healthy despite the firm's extensive capital expenditure on new data centers. However, new information suggests that there's still an enormous caveat to this news.

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Analysis from Bloomberg has poured cold water over Microsoft's AI earnings potential. Disclosures from Microsoft suggest that OpenAI accounts for around 70% of Microsoft's total AI-related income, based on projected growth and previous disclosures that relate to revenue derived from OpenAI.

Microsoft reported that Copilot has millions of paid seats in Microsoft 365, and is being gradually adopted by a wide variety of governmental, public, and private sector businesses. But when you tally it against previous disclosures, it shows that GPU and infrastructure consumption specifically from OpenAI still drives between 65 to 70% of Microsoft's total AI business. Training platforms like ChatGPT and simply serving it to customers remains the cornerstone of Microsoft's AI business. That's potentially problematic and comes with a huge amount of risk.

On the gaming side, Call of Duty having an off year was enough to drive Xbox's total revenue down by 11%, leading to masses of layoffs. OpenAI, by comparison, is estimated to be losing anywhere between 10 and 20 billion dollars per year, on a comparatively modest $2-5 billion in revenue. OpenAI has a mountain of investors keeping it afloat right now, and Microsoft itself remains one of OpenAI's biggest backers, investing to the tune of billions in cash, infra, compute credits, and other instruments. On the face of it, Microsoft's AI bookings simply represent OpenAI's compute bill packaged as revenue.

It's not unheard of in business. Spotify ran losses for years until eventually becoming profitable (to the tune of billions, I might add). The idea is that you burn through debt, scale rapidly, change user behavior, and create new markets. Then, you lock people in and make them dependent, and start monetizing. Microsoft and OpenAI's other creditors are betting that one day, ChatGPT will become the default — an inescapable cornerstone of computing for billions of people.

But what if that doesn't happen?

What if people end up choosing Claude or Gemini over ChatGPT? What if regulatory scrutiny or public opinion sours ever further? What if elections are won on the promise of blocking new data centers, rather than enabling them?

The disclosures suggest that Microsoft's AI growth is inorganic and revolves almost entirely around training ChatGPT's models. If OpenAI imploded or decelerated, Microsoft would be on the hook for billions in sunk cost and enormous amounts of excess data center capacity.

There's no suggestion of a deceleration, quite the opposite — which is why the stock price has surged. But there's also little reason to believe that this entire segment is even vaguely organic.

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Microsoft is already trying to diversify by training its own "more efficient" MAI models for consumer applications while boosting external enterprise adoption. It's started to devote more attention to its legacy consumer businesses too, namely Xbox and Windows, as neglect therein becomes untenable. But none of this will save Microsoft or its shareholders if the so-called "AI bubble" well and truly does pop.

It'll be interesting to watch how CEO Satya Nadella navigates Microsoft through this somewhat unprecedented era.

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I've written thousands of articles for Windows Central and other outlets. I've gotten better at writing clean text the first time around, but I still rely on tools to proofread anything I put on the site. It's rare to be perfect on a first run, even with breaking news, so I appreciate a set of digital eyes looking things over.

For years, I relied on Microsoft Word to spot typos and mistakes, but over the last month I used Copilot and Gemini to look at my work. The experience has taught me a lot about how AI tools view text and where Editor within Microsoft Word is weak.

During my testing, I only used Copilot and Gemini to proofread text I had already written. I also used the free versions of both tools.

Copilot feels more personal

I primarily used Copilot and Gemini to proofread documents by following a specific prompt, so you may assume that the "personalities" of the tools would be hidden. Surprisingly, that was not the case. Copilot and Gemini respond to the same prompt differently, and in my experience, Copilot feels more personal.

Occasionally, I'd ask follow-up questions to clarify a correction or try to understand why one of the tools suggested a specific edit. In those cases, the personality differences between Copilot and Gemini were more apparent.

Both tools share the AI cliches you'd expect, like overusing the word "actually," using em dashes, and starting responses with phrases like "you hit the nail on the head."

Copilot usually understood the flow of a piece better than Gemini, which led to better corrections and suggestions in relation to phrasing. Copilot did better with analyzing editorial pieces and recommending how to rearrange a piece.

Gemini feels like a coworker

Copilot feeling personal is fine for general queries, and I suspect it performs well on engagement surveys, but it's not necessarily the best thing in an AI tool. When presented with the same prompt as Copilot, Gemini often yielded more thorough and accurate corrections in relation to mechanical issues. It also wasted less time with pleasantries.

In my specific use case, Gemini felt like an upgraded Microsoft Editor while Copilot felt like a modern Clippy. Both assistants thrive in different areas and have their respective blind spots.

Gemini often tries to correct mistakes related to product names because its training data is old. I'd have to specifically tell Gemini to search the web to get context. Copilot needed nudging in this area as well, but not nearly as much.

Both are better than Microsoft Editor

Before trying Copilot and Gemini, I ran all my articles through Microsoft Editor to spot typos. I’ve continued to do that over the last month and was surprised by how much Microsoft Editor missed compared to Copilot and Gemini.

Microsoft Editor does a fine job spotting most typos or obvious grammar mistakes, but it struggles in nuanced areas. It feels like Microsoft Editor has a bunch of common mistakes programmed that it looks out for indiscriminately, and sometimes incorrectly.

For example, in a document I wrote asking for sponsors for the American football team I run, Microsoft Editor wrongly stated I needed to change “over time” to “overtime.” The phrase in question was, “Footballs wear down over time.”

Neither Copilot nor Gemini was tripped up by that phrasing. That was a trend in my testing, and it often occurred in reverse as well. Copilot and Gemini would spot times I accidentally typed “or” instead of “of” within a document. Editor did not flag those mistakes.

Overall, the AI tools feel like they look at a document with context. Both Copilot and Gemini would often spot incorrect tenses, typos that resulted in the wrong word appearing, and other issues that rely on viewing an entire sentence at once. In contrast, Editor feels like a big if/then machine with rigid rules applied without context.

You can do more with Copilot and Gemini

Copilot and Gemini have both proven useful during my testing, but I haven't used them to their full extent. Both tools are fully capable of generating text or converting rough drafts into polished copy.

I don't use AI to write anything I publish on Windows Central, so Copilot and Gemini were operating with heavy restrictions. When drafting some personal documents, I asked both AI tools to rewrite text, generate text from bullet points, and change the tone of my writing. Both did well, though I would always suggest that a human review any output.

If you need to create text and are okay having AI work alongside you, I think Copilot and Gemini have a place. In my experience, they do best with very clear instructions and after a human has done the heavy lifting, such as breaking down the key points needed in a section of text.

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Microsoft is making it genuinely difficult to write original headlines. The company is moving so many free features behind paywalls that I’m starting to worry readers will assume I’ve published the same article twice.

Just this week, I've covered Microsoft Whiteboard requiring a Microsoft Business account, meeting preparation in Outlook needing a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, and Microsoft getting rid of Copilot Podcasts without offering any way to download previously created content.

Now, Deep Research in Copilot is on the chopping block. And in a not-so-surprising move, the replacement for that feature requires a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription.

Deep Research is a Copilot feature that creates detailed reports and provides full citations. It will be retired on August 18, 2026. The successor to Deep Research is Researcher.

I wanted to run Deep Research to further detail the transition, but Copilot said it was already impossible to activate Deep Research mode. Apparently the August 18 cutoff is for full retirement but the feature is already being phased out.

Researcher and Deep Research overlap when it comes to features and purpose, but there are some differences. Researcher integrates with Microsoft 365 and is meant for business users.

Are we all just AI beta testers?

It feels like Microsoft has turned a corner in its AI strategy. After spending billions of dollars and trying to force-feed Copilot and other AI tools onto its users, Microsoft now has an idea of what people actually want. With all that data, Microsoft is trimming the fat and moving any tasty AI morsels behind paywalls.

The freemium model is not new, but it can be frustrating for users when pushed to the extreme. Companies often introduce features for free only to later evolve them into paid tools. This is especially common with smartphone apps, but it's a widespread strategy.

But requiring payment goes over easier when the paid products are better than what was once free. I'm fine paying for an app or service that's worth it, but simply shifting free features to paid subscriptions is poor form.

Microsoft should have the basic versions of features available through free apps, such as Copilot, then make better versions with more capabilities that are accessible to paid users. Right now, Copilot feels like a glorified demo or an interactive ad for what will eventually be paid products.

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The day when AI isn't completely polarizing feels like it'll never arrive, and there's a definite divide between those for and those against.

This drama has now spilled into the Linux kernel, prompting a lengthy and firm response from its creator, Linus Torvalds (via GamingOnLinux).

It emerged as a topic referencing using AI and a tool called "Sashiko" for agentic reviews of changes to the Linux kernel. Then in swoops Torvalds to firmly put his foot down.

The full transcript of his response is below:

"Yes.

And no, that's not the position of the Linux kernel. I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.

Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs" standpoint.

But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem to do.

The solution is to make sure those LLM tools _help_ maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side.

We're not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.

And no, AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.

Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.

The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.

Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that's a side benefit, not the _point_ of the project.

This is *NOT* some kind of "social warrior" project, never has been, and never will be.

In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.

And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools.

Linus"

I can already see the pitchforks rising, but let's take a step back. While Torvalds does appear to be flexing some muscle, if you read carefully, he's also not actually advocating for AI.

"AI is a tool... And clearly a useful one." There's no ideology behind it. He's not suddenly saying that the Linux kernel is going to be built using AI. More that if it can be used to make certain parts of the process better, then it will be.

And as he says, human intelligence isn't exactly perfect, is it?

It's a sticky wicket and sure to provoke some discussion. Linux is where many of the most serious enthusiasts go, and plenty just have a fundamental opposition to AI. I'm not getting into that, because it's exhausting, and we've been round and round on the topic plenty.

I do like Torvalds' approach in addressing this, though. Unlike, say, Microsoft, there are no business interests to push and bank accounts to swell by pushing the general public into using AI. There's also an alternative; if you don't like it, you can fork it and make your own. There are already plenty of custom kernels on Linux.

He's simply being pragmatic. The genie is free from the lamp; AI is here, and ignoring it simply isn't an option. Everyone can have their own opinion, but as he states, Linux isn't a "social warrior" project. They're just trying to make the best software, and increasingly, that's going to mean folks leveraging AI. Like it or not.

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It's hard to find AI optimists these days.

AI-adjacent stocks have taken a battering in recent months, with Oracle and Microsoft particularly hard hit. Microsoft's stock is down over 20% from last summer's highs, as investors increasingly worry that the firm has over-extended and misjudged the opportunities therein.

Wider questions remain about the future viability of the tech. Cheaper Chinese models are pressuring the big U.S. hyper-scalers to find new efficiencies and strategies, as firms like OpenAI, SpaceX, Palantir, and Anthropic struggle to justify their more optimistic valuations. Some of the more dire warnings suggest the rife circular investments and financing could implode, threatening not only the associated companies, but potentially the entire global economy.

Recently, I caught up with Ed Zitron, head of EZPR and the Better Offline Podcast, who has become a prominent journalistic voice in AI analysis. Zitron's industry-leading tech newsletter Where's Your Ed At has become a primary source for those navigating the complex (and shady?) financial deals these companies are weaving, cutting through the industry hype with an oft-times scathing dose of reality.

I asked Zitron specifically about Microsoft's bets in this space, as the hype train objectively begins to lose steam.

Microsoft occupies an odd space in the "AI race," if you can still call it that at this point. Why do you think Wall Street and the stock market are rewarding Google but punishing Microsoft this year?

"It’s because Microsoft is uniquely awful at having to prove its worth outside of financials, and is run by some of the most decrepit, disconnected, and directionless leadership I’ve seen in any company I’ve ever monitored.

Whenever this company has to beguile investors, it can usually just throw up big money numbers and raise the price on Microsoft Office. This time it made the mistake of actually spending cash — and man, did AI save its ass from humiliation by distracting from its Activision-Blizzard acquisition! — on something, and doing so in the loudest way possible, because saying “AI” and spending lots of money on AI was all it took to make people buy your stock.

Sadly, $200 billion or more in capex in, Satya Nadella doesn’t really have a compelling answer as to where this money is going. He mentioned on their last earnings that they’d hit a $37 billion run rate for AI - around $3 billion a month in revenue, with the vast majority of that being OpenAI’s compute spend — and it didn’t get anybody hot and heavy, so the stock has kept tanking."

"This is also because Azure has been a much bigger business than Google Cloud.

Sundar Pichai is also better at the financial tricks than Satya Nadella, and worked out a way to make circular financing more conspicuous, selling Anthropic its own chips and then getting those chips put in Google data centers so that it can get the revenue from Anthropic, who it funds, buying compute. That huge bump in remaining performance obligations was, to be clear, mostly from circular financing.

I have no idea why Satya didn’t do this with OpenAI’s spend, and I have to wonder if he doesn’t start being really blunt about how much it’s boosting Azure revenue, even though that’ll probably work to his detriment.

Anyway, Google Cloud is a younger and smaller business and thus much easier to show explosive growth in. Satya is also not very good at marketing."

Do you think Microsoft will realistically see any long-term return on investment from its data center build out? Have they completely misjudged the potential?

"So, this depends on your definition of “ROI.” I think that, long-term, this will be seen as a disastrous, horrifying misallocation of capital, the kind of thing that will potentially get Satya Nadella fired.

In the short-term, Nadella got “ROI” out of AI in that it kept Microsoft interesting, and OpenAI’s compute spend buoyed Azure’s revenues without them ever having to disclose AI’s actual contribution. It was a shiny object to show investors, which gave them a vague sense of growth.

This was always a gamble, and because Microsoft started the era, it will inevitably be harmed the most by it.

No, I do not see any ROI at scale. Microsoft has spent over $200 billion on AI capex and will probably spend anywhere from $300 to $400 billion if it continues its pace past this year. It will need to make more than $500 billion in brand, spanking new revenue, in a very conspicuous way, to make any of this feel worthwhile."

"The problem they face is that the longer this goes on, the less incremental it can be. Showing modest growth in Intelligent Cloud and Business & Productivity isn’t going to make this problem go away.

The other is that the clock starts the second they stop spending on capex, and that includes a cut of anything more than 30%. Maybe they try and spread it out, but at some point they’re gonna have to stop, because this is a ludicrous expense.

But once they do, the street will start asking them to prove that they didn’t just nuke hundreds of billions of dollars and take on a bunch of debt for no reason.

I will say this: Amy Hood is very good at her job, and likely the only reason Satya Nadella hasn’t blown up the entire company."

Microsoft's early investment in OpenAI was initially hailed. In your research, how has that partnership panned out? Reporting suggests it hasn't gone well …

"At first, OpenAI must have seemed like the best thing that happened to Microsoft since it won that antitrust trial because the judge talked to the media. It was the single-most buzzy company in the world, and it had to spend money on Azure.

Satya Nadella could say that he had backed the next big tech titan, all while capturing the entirety of its value and cloud spend. The original deal - owning all the IP, making Azure their only cloud provider, all that stuff was a masterstroke.

Except it’s very obvious that something went sour there in 2024 or early 2025, likely when OpenAI demanded Microsoft build more compute than it wanted to. It must have also become clear that owning all of OpenAI’s IP and models and being able to power their services with it wasn’t actually helping Microsoft enough to justify the capex, so they got desperate and bought Mustafa Suleyman’s crappy little company so he’d bring that DeepMind magic to Microsoft."

"Also, Sam Altman very clearly started making demands that were effectively “change the agreement to our benefit for no apparent reason,” and Microsoft embarrassed themselves making any concessions for him. I think that Satya had assumed he had full control of Altman, and when that wasn’t apparent, I think it weakened both his and Microsoft’s position.

And, if I’m honest, Microsoft has embarrassed itself with AI - substandard models, lots of noise but not a lot of actual stuff, running GitHub Copilot at a massive loss for several years, then turning on token-based billing and creating a bunch of bad blood for no measurable gain?

The partnership was great when Satya had control, and the moment he let Altman buy compute from other companies was the moment he lost it, even though it was absolutely the right thing to do."

Windows users have backlashed pretty hard against some of Microsoft's AI products, including things like random Copilot buttons and Windows Recall. Do you see Microsoft finding any realistically good and viable uses for LLMs?

"Nope! I don’t remember the last time that Microsoft made anything that was both new and good, and every “idea” that Microsoft has is literally somebody else’s! Copilot Cowork is Claude Cowork, GitHub CLI is Claude Code, Scout is Codex or some other agentic crap; it’s all the same thing in the glossy Microsoft wrapper that used to mean “good but expensive” but now means “weird and sterile.”

This is not a product company, and the only thing they seem to be able to do with talent is lay it off. Nobody wants anything they’re selling other than for the products they like to work like they used to. If I surveyed 100 people about what they’d change about Microsoft, I bet at least 30% of them would say “remove Copilot.”

For that to change would require Microsoft to make a completely different product."

What do you think the AI landscape will look like in 5 years, if you had to predict?

"These are all guesses, and I can’t append them to any time period. I’m pulling them out of thin air — I can’t see the future! Nobody can! These are things that could happen far more than they are for sure events.

1. LLMs are gone from the cloud other than for obscure GCP/Azure/AWS instances with AI GPUs for people doing very specific things, all of which cost way too much to do regularly.

Whatever LLMs survive are a boring on-device situation you run on a $100k workstation, and that’s not very common because they’re pretty expensive. That being said, this might also be what happens to the large amounts of GPUs that are left for dead after the bubble pops.

2. Eventually, the big labs have to start doing aggressive cost cuts, which up usage but up costs, or cost increases, which destroys usage. Either way, growth is slowing because of token-minimizing, and it’ll accelerate and eventually break the companies."

"OpenAI dies or gets absorbed into Microsoft, who jacks up the prices and unwinds the business. The same happens to Anthropic, which likely becomes a much smaller company that’s effectively a subsidiary of Google and Amazon.

3. Microsoft does a $5bn-$10bn write-down of GPUs and Nadella is booted in favor of Amy Hood. Maybe more!

4. The software industry enters a prolonged depression within the next few years because growth starts to stumble in one of the major hyperscalers. Remember: Anthropic and OpenAI are currently boosting the revenues of Microsoft, Google and Amazon, to a level that I really should look into!

5. NVIDIA’s revenues eventually return to the 2023 era, single-digit billions of dollars annually. I also expect some sort of write-down on their side too."

A huge thanks to Ed Zitron — now it's your turn

Thanks a ton to Ed Zitron for joining us on this piece. Be sure to check out Ed Zitron's podcast and newsletters here; both are full of incredible research and insights into the AI biz more recently, but also tech in general.

Often when I'm writing about AI, I feel like the big players are gaslighting me into believing that the tech is good enough to solve all of humanity's problems, if we'll just hang on and accept a little bit more (a lot more) compute. While it seems AI does have a role to play in parsing large quantities of data and tracking anomalies humans might miss, the "hyperscale" opportunities increasingly seem far-fetched and vague as we head through the current cycle.

Where it all ends up remains anyone's best guess. Perhaps some kind of incredible breakthrough will give AI the nuance and accuracy it needs to actually be a viable general-purpose assistant — rather than an expensive mimicry and content theft machine.

Perhaps its pairing with robotics will enable real opportunities that have so far eluded the big corps. Or perhaps the simple truth is: there's no real room for optimism here. Perhaps we've all been conned by something that seems suspiciously capable on the surface, until you actually put it to any form of real work.

What do you think? Hit the comments, let's talk.

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Microsoft's share price has slid 22% in the past year, as investors increasingly cast doubt on the firm's long-term AI strategy.

Artificial intelligence has been billed as the next coming by Big Tech, with everyone from Amazon to Google trying to figure out how to leverage the expensive technology to generate profits. The problem is, nobody is even close to having an answer.

Generative AI is incredibly costly to run, and the return on investment is unclear at best. Many companies are starting to discover that, in fact, it's cheaper and more effective to simply use human labor. Companies that previously laid off engineers in favor of AI models later found themselves crawling back to those fired, and others have put large restrictions on token expenditure as returns remain elusive.

I saw a clip on CNBC from Ed Zitron, creator of the Where's Your Ed At newsletter and host of the Better Offline podcast recently. It summarized Microsoft's AI conundrum in pro wrestling terminology — which appealed to my simple brain. His full analysis is anything but simplistic, though. It speaks to the hard reality companies like Microsoft are facing: Is any of this actually worth it?

Zitron describes the challenges of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic joining SpaceX in going public, describing how the company's financial realities betray the almost demented hype around them.

"They'd be the first to be this bad, other than WeWork, and this is so much worse than that. OpenAI burned $20.9 billion dollars in 2025. The problem with these companies is ... their margins are getting worse. Their costs increase linearly with their revenues. There's no proof they can improve their margins. No amount of specialist silicon will bring these costs down.

"We're at a point where OpenAI is pushing their IPO to 2027 because they couldn't get a trillion-dollar valuation. People are wising up to the problem of generative AI: there's not really a business there."

Zitron posits that none of the hyperscalers and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic "encourage waste," while potentially stealing ideas generated by companies using their models, citing Claude Design and Figma. Indeed, the only public company that seems to be flying on its AI hype right now is Google. I would argue that's less to do with innovating, and more because they've found a way to steal revenue from human creators via Gemini's Google Search summary box — instantaneously creating infinite, dynamic (albeit hallucinating) ad-scaling opportunities.

This wholesale content theft is not as readily available to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Microsoft. Google Search remains the dominant tool for browsing the web, and thanks to Chrome and Android, Google owns the entire stack here.

Microsoft very much does not own the entire stack. It barely owns a stack at all here.

Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI is on the verge of collapse, pending contractual obligations that will expire over the next few years. It's already ditching OpenAI's pricey models in favor of supposedly more-efficient MAI home-grown models in some products. Microsoft Copilot is already barely used, despite being baked into Windows. It languishes at lower than 10% of the market, according to estimates, far behind the likes of Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

CEO Satya Nadella's decision to give up on Windows Phone and internal Android projects has precluded Microsoft from any form of mobile play here. Mobile is where all new consumer tech will thrive, whether or not it's AI or something else. The historical open nature of Windows prevents it from reaching consumers with any of its products. Nobody uses Bing, Edge, or Copilot, and it's a result of Microsoft's wholesale lack of foresight.

Microsoft bet that it could provide the underlying infrastructure instead, and has spent monstrous amounts of CapEx on data centers in the past few years. But Zitron posited in a large report from May that it might be exaggerating, or perhaps even outright lying, about its data center expansion plans. Indeed, there's little evidence that Microsoft has actually expanded its capacity since 2024. Zitron tracked a variety of Microsoft-announced data center projects and found them in various states of incompletion.

Is this a signal that there's no real demand? Is Microsoft intentionally stalling and dragging out construction because it knows there's no actual ROI incoming from these projects?

AI-adjacent stocks, including SpaceX, Oracle, and Microsoft, have all been in near free-fall decline recently, as investors seem to bet that there's gross over-extension going on. Meta is also reportedly spinning up a cloud company to try and offload excess compute it had previously invested in AI specifically, despite not having any actual demand.

"The only reason Big Tech is investing in this is that they've run out of hypergrowth ideas," Zitron said, on the general AI industry. "They don't have a next iPhone, they don't have a new Google Search. They've put over a trillion, with trillions more to come, into a kind of dead-end industry. When that ends, they'll have to admit that they don't have anything else."

"In the future, I see [AI] as a boring hardware-based business, kind of the Oracle licensing hardware model. I think this is a $10 to $30 billion TAM [total addressable market] industry, pretending to be a $1 trillion industry."

"Everyone is just kind of pretending. It's the kayfabe of a tech industry that really has run out of ideas."

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Perhaps David Gaider needs no introduction, but the former lead narrative designer and writer behind the Dragon Age franchise during his time at BioWare, who has since gone on to co-found Summerfall Studios, had some rather choice words for generative AI. They're words I'm sure many of us can agree with.

In an interview with our sister site GamesRadar+, Gaider pulled no punches when sharing his thoughts on generative AI, describing it as a "virulent plague." However, he also offers an interesting perspective, and one I think many people, especially executives, should pay attention to.

“I think the fact that generative AI is frequently trained on data regardless of whether creators or owners have agreed to have their data pillaged in this manner opens up any use of it to all sorts of future legal issues - even if one chooses to ignore the moral implications, which one really shouldn't.”

Ethical concerns surrounding how AI is trained have existed (and been studied) for quite some time. It's also true that many AI models have been trained on data that critics argue was used without permission. However, these aren't the comments I found most thought-provoking. Instead, it's Gaider's view of AI as a tool, and his belief that it's robbing people of valuable opportunities to learn and develop essential skills.

Gaider says:

“In all my time as a narrative designer I've never once encountered a situation where editing an inferior product took less time than simply throwing it out and redoing it would have or resulted in anything better than mediocre. And while there's potential for AI handling the drudgery, I also think we have to be very careful about not eliminating every task which is useful for training juniors. How are we going to train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task?”

That part in particular that resonated with me. I remember doing my Master’s degree around the time ChatGPT started to exist, and I remember sitting behind people in lectures watching them use it to answer questions. While I absolutely think AI can be a useful tool, it increasingly feels like it's being used to replace our ability to think critically and learn. Even something as simple as researching a topic and finding the answers yourself is beginning to feel like a lost art.

Now, I know Gaider's comments aren't necessarily about AI's broader use in education or everyday life, but it's hard, at least for me, not to draw those comparisons when reading what he had to say.

Gaider also expanded on his thoughts, stating:

“I can't even imagine using it for bigger tasks like programming. How does one bug fix 'vibe coding'? What's the point of creating prototypes with AI when the result is that nobody on the team has actually learned anything about how to make the final product? Why use AI to create concepts which are inevitably going to be soulless and contain errors and which aren't going to be something your own artists can replicate? Why have systems that nobody on your team really knows how they work? I could go on and on.”

Again, it echoes the same concern. If AI is being used in the way Gaider describes, people simply aren't learning. They could end up with a pile of code they don't fully understand, making it much harder to troubleshoot or improve later. I also think that idea extends well beyond programming. It can apply to almost any medium where AI is doing the work for you.

I'm guilty of it myself. I'll sometimes use AI to help me cook something new, and admittedly, I often leave the kitchen realizing I don't actually remember how to recreate the recipe on my own. That may simply be because I'm using it as a set of instructions rather than actively learning the process, but it's a loose comparison that came to mind while reading Gaider's comments.

I'll leave you with Gaider's most striking thoughts on how AI should be treated within the gaming industry: "It should be treated like the virulent plague it is."

I could rant even more given the current state of the industry, but alas, I'd definitely recommend checking out Gaider's last game, Malys. Let me know your thoughts in the comments; I'd genuinely love to discuss this one, and be sure to take part in our poll!

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In recent months, Microsoft has taken significant steps to improve the Windows 11 user experience through its Windows K2 initiative, including scaling back where Copilot and its integrations appear across the interface.

And now, these efforts appear to have extended to Microsoft Edge. As spotted by Neowin, Microsoft has decided to discontinue its AI-powered history search feature in the Chromium-based browser

"Enhanced search finds sites in your History even when you use a synonym, phrase, or typo," Microsoft added. "After this feature is turned on, sites you visit will be shown in enhanced history search results. An on-device model is trained using your data, which never leaves your device and is never sent to Microsoft. Admins can use the EdgeHistoryAISearchEnabled policy to disable this feature."

Microsoft promised that the feature would leverage on-device AI, keeping your data private, secure, and away from the cloud. It's worth noting that the feature was rolling out to users in waves.

The company has since made an update on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap entry (dated June 25, 2026), indicating:

"We have decided not to move forward with this change at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Neowin reported that many users described the feature as "creepy," while others voiced concerns about trusting Microsoft to keep their data on-device. Some also criticized it as yet another attempt to turn Edge into bloatware.

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If, by some miracle, you've been living on the moon in a soundproof dome for the last six months, you may not have noticed that gaming hardware has grown extremely expensive, making the hobby a mostly miserable affair for all involved. We first called it the RAM crisis, but the sad reality is that it's now spilling over into storage, and experts are predicting a grim future.

It's shredding PC gaming, as Valve's much-anticipated Steam Machine launched at over $1,000 for its cheapest model — a higher price than most might have expected — with its creators explaining that it "reflects the state of the world". Consumers are flanked at every turn, as anyone planning to buy older generations of memory sees that DDR4 and even DDR3 prices are going up.

It's easy to point fingers at Microsoft, given its undeniable, if somewhat retracted, obsession with AI, whether that's Copilot in Windows or an implementation across its Azure cloud stack. And let's be honest, it's not without irony that XBOX CEO Asha Sharma said that "gaming is becoming unaffordable" just before the brand announced a price increase on its consoles.

Sure enough, Xbox's Matthew Ball agrees that "crisis is the right term", and the effects of expensive RAM will undoubtedly be felt in the lead-up to its next-gen Project Helix console — which supposedly behaves more like a gaming PC — and who knows what its launch price might look like (over a thousand dollars?) In fact, hardware pivots are already appearing in Microsoft's PC hardware, as the Surface Laptop returns with 8GB of RAM to keep costs down.

I know, I'm hardly a beacon of good news or hopeful visions of the future, but this AI bubble will presumably break at some point, and it's good to take stock of what options we actually have. The usual midsummer onslaught of sales events brought some relief with retailer discounts, and pre-built gaming PCs maintain a hint of value throughout. Still, prospective buyers will have to brace for an inevitable sting if they plan to grab something later this year (or into 2027).

If you're interested in console gaming, you're looking at a minimum of $749.99 for a digital Xbox Series X — that's the one without a disc drive — or $499.99 for a similarly discless (and less powerful) Xbox Series S. On Sony's side, a PS5 Pro is now $899.99, or at least $599.99 for a digital base PS5. That's without any games, by the way, and Grand Theft Auto VI recently confirmed a $99 price tag for a code of its Ultimate Edition with all in-game content intact.

Gamers at large are already expected to spend close to $1,000 just to get started. The entire situation is absurd and unfair, but it puts the price of handhelds like MSI's $1,799 Claw 8 EX AI+ into perspective; that's just how much this kind of ultra-enthusiast hardware costs now. The whole thing reminds me of a bygone era of crypto mining that drove up GPU prices, but this time, it's bigger and even more insulting.

So, what are you supposed to do? You can penny-pinch your way through buying discounted and second-hand hardware, or you can submit to a future of subscription-based gaming streamed from the cloud. If you don't already own an Xbox, I'd suggest picking one up before the price increase happens in August, but that's about all you can do. Stay strong, gamers.

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Over the past few years, we've seen generative AI cement its footprint in the workplace and even take over redundant, repetitive tasks entirely. Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed that AI was on the verge of slashing up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs, making it harder for Gen Z to enter the job market.

Even Microsoft's AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, recently cleared up the intent of his statement that AI would eliminate white‑collar jobs in less than 18 months. The executive indicated that the statement was blown out of proportion, further clarifying that he meant AI would augment repetitive, mundane tasks — not replace humans.

In 2025, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates indicated that AI would replace humans for most things. However, the philanthropic billionaire claimed that it'd be mostly up to humans to decide how they interact with the next-gen technology.

The executive previously indicated that biologists, energy workers, and coders would survive the AI revolution, citing that their complex nature constantly requires human intervention.

Incidentally, Gates may have just identified a fourth profession that could be safe from AI replacement — athletes. During an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, he suggested that while AI might take over many human tasks, no one would want to watch computers playing baseball (via LADbible Group).

With that in mind, it’s safe to say we’ll continue to savor the moments when our favorite players like Arsenal’s right winger Bukayo Saka grace the pitch with their talent and keep us entertained, even now during the World Cup season.

As AI gains broad adoption and becomes more prevalent, it will undoubtedly reshape how we work or even redefine what the term means. Last year, a study by Microsoft Research highlighted 40 job roles that are at risk of extinction in the age of AI, including customer service representatives, interpreters, technical writers, editors, web developers, and more.

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Microsoft and OpenAI are no strangers in the corridors of justice, particularly when it comes to copyright infringement disputes. It is well established that advanced AI models such as Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT rely heavily on vast amounts of online content, including material from outlets like Windows Central, for training purposes.

In court proceedings, Microsoft and OpenAI have consistently argued that copyright law does not explicitly prohibit the use of online content to train AI models. However, with Google racing ahead by embedding AI directly into search, the industry finds itself at a tipping point. As traditional outlets struggle to compete, many are shutting down, leaving thousands of experienced journalists in the lurch.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has openly acknowledged that building tools like ChatGPT would be virtually impossible without relying on copyrighted material. That admission now looms large as a coalition of publishers, representing nearly 400 newspapers, has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing them of copyright infringement (via Bloomberg).

The complaint indicates that the two companies are unlawfully using their content to develop and train the AI chatbots without consent or compensation. According to the complaint:

"Defendants systematically and secretly crawled the Publishers’ websites—including content behind paywalls and other access restrictions—and copied the Publishers’ articles, stories, and other original works onto their own servers without authorization."

The publishers argue that the companies have generated billions from stealing their work and have not paid a dime for it. They are now seeking statutory damages and injunctive relief, citing copyright infringement and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Speaking to Bloomberg, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri indicated:

“Our models empower innovation, are trained on publicly available data, and are grounded in fair use."

“It would be inequitable if at the end of this you have a resolution that only benefits the largest players in the marketplace and not the people who are doing hard work reporting on things that frankly very few outlets still cover in America today,” former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin added.

The publishers argue that the AI revolution could be a "death knell for local journalism" if these AI firms aren't held accountable and continue to steal content without compensation.

Elsewhere, a separate 2024 report suggests that AI companies, including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, had hit a wall due to a lack of high-quality content for training, which prevented them from developing advanced AI models.

This opens up a broader discussion about the future of AI models if Google is hell-bent on integrating AI into search, after it has practically run every publication into the ground.

The dead internet theory, in particular, comes to mind. It suggests that prolonged exposure of large language models to low-quality training data negatively impacts accuracy, comprehension, and thought process. What's worse is that the phenomenon could only be less than 3 years away if recent studies are anything to go by.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that AI must demonstrate real‑world value or risk losing public support. His comments came amid mounting community backlash over the technology’s heavy demand for electricity and cooling water to power data centers, although Microsoft and NVIDIA have seemingly found a fix.

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal recently, Nadella echoed his earlier stance, stressing that leading players in the AI industry must advance the technology in ways that deliver the greatest public benefit.

There’s growing concern around AI, particularly when it comes to security, privacy, and even its impact on jobs. "You can't say, hey, all white-collar jobs are gone and this could even be a weapon, and we will use all the power to build data centers," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted.

Perhaps more interestingly, the executive called out key investors in the AI landscape who see the technology primarily as a tool to cut jobs and reduce operational costs. He indicated that this would be the wrong way to look at the technology.

Instead, he recommended that AI should be viewed as a tool designed to help skilled workers better leverage their capabilities. He further painted a picture where AI tools and human capital co-exist in the same space, a phenomenon he referred to as "token capital."

While the executive claimed that it'd be a recipe for how companies can leverage both AI and workers simultaneously, he admitted that: "it's a lot of change management, it's a lot of displacement, but there is a path."

Nadella indicated that leveraging AI and humans at the same time at work can create a "continuous learning system." He indicated that companies in the future could be characterized by the "tacit knowledge that they contain from both sources."

The executive acknowledged that the idea might face public resistance but emphasized that it would be up to corporations to convince people of the economic opportunities AI could unlock in the future.

Over the past few years, key investors and leaders in the AI landscape have shared several theories, highlighting how the technology could reshape work. Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed that AI was on the verge of slashing up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs, making it harder for the next generation to enter the job market.

Interestingly, Microsoft's AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, recently cleared up the intent of his statement that AI would eliminate white‑collar jobs in less than 18 months.

The executive indicated that his statement was widely misconstrued. Rather than replacing humans entirely from work, he indicated that AI would be used to augment repetitive and mundane tasks.

At the same time, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wants AI agents to be treated like human employees. It'll be interesting to see how AI is adopted in the workplace, and whether organizations choose to view the technology as a supplement rather than a replacement for the workforce.

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Generative AI has made a significant impact across education, computing, medicine, entertainment, and more. However, all that progress comes with a hefty price tag. The amount of electricity these systems burn through, plus the insane amounts of water needed to keep them cool, is honestly outrageous.

For context, Microsoft and Google's electricity consumption in 2024 surpassed the power usage of over 100 countries. Similarly, OpenAI's GPT-4 AI model consumes up to 3 water bottles to generate 100 words.

Earlier this month, Microsoft shared an interesting concept that may potentially address the water concerns riddling the progression and advancement of AI. CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the tech giant uses a liquid loop in its data centers, which is filled once. As a result, the company's data centers' water consumption has reduced significantly, down to "what a single restaurant would use."

And now it looks like NVIDIA is taking a page from Microsoft’s playbook. Speaking at London Climate Week on Monday, a top executive suggested that water concerns tied to data center development could be addressed through the company's next-generation AI infrastructure.

The executive further disclosed that the company's new next-gen AI infrastructure can be fully cooled with a liquid warm enough to alleviate the need for additional chilling equipment (Axios).

According to NVIDIA's Chief Sustainability Officer, Josh Parker:

"The water consumption challenge for data centers is largely solved."

How does this liquid work? It’s basically a recirculated mix of water and propylene — think automotive antifreeze. It’s worth noting that the system can operate at temperatures up to 113 degrees Fahrenheit.

As such, this allows it to function reliably in hotter environments compared to older systems. In practical terms, data centers equipped with NVIDIA’s next-generation AI infrastructure will require significantly less water and energy for cooling, reducing both operational costs and environmental impact.

This announcement comes at a time when concerns over water and energy use are mounting, as data centers continue to expand into community corridors. Microsoft has seemingly embraced the "Community-First" AI infrastructure, which addresses some of the issues raised by communities themselves, including reducing its water consumption and promising not to increase electricity bills.

Elsewhere, Microsoft’s plan to build a $1 billion data center in Kenya came to an abrupt halt in early May after the government declined to commit to covering the annual capacity costs Microsoft had requested to run Azure in the region. President William Ruto remarked that the facility’s power demands would be so immense that it would effectively require “switching off half the country” to keep it operational.

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An essay published last week by a Microsoft Principal Scientist and University of York Researcher is getting some viral heat, and the title alone was enough to make me do a double-take: "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II."

The paper, authored by Adrian de Wynter, is not a joke. Well, it's sort of a joke, but not in the way I first thought. The premise is simple (heh heh). De Wynter built and trained a working neural network inside Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, the remaster of 1999's legendary real-time strategy masterpiece.

Using the game's rather powerful custom map editor, de Wynter constructed operational NAND gates using palisade walls, grass, and bridge terrain, with goats as signal carriers.

While admittedly rudimentary, de Wynter essentially built the basics of a modern AI system. And by doing so, he flipped one of the biggest assumptions in AI research on its head.

Do AI systems have human qualities? AI research wants you to believe so.

There are countless AI studies out there that you can read suggesting that Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude possess human-like qualities. I'm talking about empathy. Anxiety. Morality. Self-awareness. The stuff that makes humans human.

Researchers design experiments around these assumptions, test LLMs with them, and report on their findings. There's a problem with this approach. De Wynter looked at more than 300 AI research papers published in the last two years and discovered that more than half of them were created under the assumption that, yes, LLMs do have human attributes.

If an AI paper's author specifically set out to prove that LLMs possess human properties, a whopping 77% concluded that those properties existed. You can see how there's a rather serious confirmation bias at play.

Playing Age of Empires 2 at a truly high level

Age of Empires II is one of my favorite games of all time, and its thriving competitive scene nearly three decades after its original launch is something to behold. But I've never seen something like this.

In his essay, de Wynter proves that Age of Empires II is "Turing-complete," which means it can theoretically run any computation.

As mentioned, he used the game's map editor to build NAND logic gates using custom scenario triggers, with a functioning 1-bit perceptron (a "fundamental build block of neural networks").

Taken to a grand scale with a lot of effort, de Wynter effectively proves that, yes, Age of Empires II could create something functionally similar to an LLM.

Applying the same rules to Age of Empires II as we apply to AI

What de Wynter proves with this experiment is that anyone claiming LLMs have anxiety or morals also has to admit that Age of Empires II, given enough time and complexity, is in the same boat.

De Wynter doesn't stop at Age of Empires II, either.

You might look at this experiment and assume that AI is actually not as smart as everyone thinks it is. In my eyes, that's the wrong take. Instead, the experiment essentially proves that human-like behavior is actually a part of any complex system designed to produce certain results.

For AI researchers attempting to make us believe that LLMs are on the verge of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that's a rather heavy blow.

Is it time to break up with your AI partner?

AI firms design their products to feel as human as possible. That's probably why so many users form emotional attachments to soulless server racks, using them for therapy and to help with serious life decisions.

Researchers writing papers suggesting that AI possesses human-like qualities feed back into a loop of product and policy decisions from the big AI firms, creating a false illusion of what AI actually is on the inside.

De Wynter's paper posits not that AI lacks truly interesting properties, but that researchers need to be more honest in their approach. He believes that tests should be performed using a "null assumption" that doesn't start with "AI is human," with tests designed to prove the claim.

It's a pretty obvious scientific change that even I, a rural imbecile, understand is necessary to reveal the true nature of AI.

The call is coming from inside the house

I'd like to point out that de Wynter isn't an outsider hoping to discredit AI. He's an established AI researcher based at Microsoft, the company that has poured untold billions into OpenAI and that has jammed Copilot into products as much as possible.

I absolutely love that it's Age of Empires II that was used for the experiment, and I hope that de Wynter's paper has a positive effect on the AI research community. I'll be keeping a closer eye on the goats gathered around my Town Center the next time I play some Age.

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Microsoft is often referred to as the software giant — and for a good reason. Windows and Office are among the most profitable products in its ecosystem, thanks to their widespread global adoption. However, the tech giant has seemingly shifted its focus from its bread and butter to chase the elusive generative AI.

It dates back to Microsoft's first investment in OpenAI in 2019. CEO Satya Nadella revealed that his company's original co-founder, Bill Gates, wasn't party to the idea, citing the AI firm's non-profit structure. "Yeah, you're going to burn this billion dollars," Gates warned.

Conversely, a separate report claimed that Bill Gates is still intimately involved in Microsoft's affairs, despite stepping away to focus on his philanthropic efforts. His advice is reportedly regarded as gospel, with Nadella frequently relying on his guidance for the company’s transformative AI initiatives.

Nevertheless, Satya Nadella indicated that the company was moving away from Bill Gates' software factory vision: "That idea has guided us for decades," he indicated. "But today, it's no longer enough." According to Nadella, that original vision is becoming outdated as we edge closer to the AI revolution.

Instead, Microsoft is pivoting to security, quality, and AI transformation as its core business priorities. While it sounds good on paper, reality paints a very different picture (at least in the short term). Microsoft has faced a wide array of challenges in this age of AI, which could potentially undermine the backbone that has propelled it to a market capitalization of 2.82 trillion.

Too little, too late for Windows?

I've used Windows all my life, with a few side quests with Linux (Ubuntu) and macOS. Over that period, there's been a paradigm shift in Microsoft's OS, and not necessarily for the better. Windows 11's slow adoption rate before Windows 10's death is a clear depiction.

Many blatantly expressed their preference for the previous edition for a range of reasons, including Windows 11's stringent hardware requirements, flawed design elements, and more.

According to a recent HP survey, 3 out of 10 HP PCs are still running Windows 10 despite Microsoft pulling the plug on October 14, 2025. Then again, the number of Windows 10 holdouts has slightly decreased from September 2025, when HP and Dell indicated that up to 50% of PCs were still running on the operating system.

As a result, many users may not switch to Windows 11 immediately, instead delaying the upgrade until later this year, likely when ESU support officially ends.

Consequently, groups like The Restart Project group, which helped co-develop the "End of 10" toolkit to support Windows 10 users who can't upgrade to Windows 11, claim Microsoft's move to continue pushing security updates to Windows 10 beyond its end-of-support feels like a last-minute snooze button, which only acts as a band-aid on a bleeding system.

Critics have even branded Windows 10's end of support as programmed obsolescence on Microsoft's end, because the move forced millions of working PCs into early retirement, as they didn't meet the requirements to upgrade to Windows 11.

While it might seem like a stretch to some, rival platforms like Linux have shown some increased traction with incentives like a lack of ads and telemetry tracking fueling the switch from Microsoft's ecosystem. Some of our own Windows Central community members share the same sentiments, too.

That said, it might be too early to write off Windows. At the beginning of the year, Microsoft pledged to improve the overall user sentiment around the operating system, and has made good on its promise with its Windows K2 initiative (an internal initiative designed to address major pain points across Windows 11 based on customer feedback), including reducing where Copilot and other AI integrations appear across the operating system.

The company even brought back Windows Insider meetups to bridge the gap between users and the Windows development team, potentially making it easier to voice concerns and even provide feedback that will help steer the platform in the right direction.

However, Microsoft plans to evolve Windows into an agentic AI operating system — a move that has been received with mixed feelings. It indicated that Windows will ship with a new agentic workspace feature right out of the box, containing AI agents in their own secure sessions.

Last month, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of product marketing for AI and Copilot, transitioned to a new role focused on "reimagining Windows for the agentic era" before eventually departing the company. This is a clear indication that the evolution of Windows into an agentic OS is already on track and could happen sooner than you think.

It'll be interesting to see how this will impact Microsoft's massive market share on desktops with Windows, and whether users will jump ship to "less intrusive" alternatives.

Office lost Teams, and Microsoft thought Copilot would sweeten the deal

In case you missed it, Microsoft unbundled Teams from Office 365 to dodge EU antitrust fines in 2025. The new arrangement offers Office 365 and Microsoft 365 without Teams at a lower cost, at around $2.20 (€2) less per user each month. This means you'll have to get Teams as a standalone service for about $5.50 (€5) per user per month.

In April, Salesforce filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, citing anticompetitive practices related to its Microsoft Teams app: "Microsoft's practices harmed ⁠competition, using tying and bundling of Teams to ​limit customer choice," the Slack maker claimed.

However, Microsoft dismissed the claims, citing that the antitrust case lacked merit. At the same time, it used the opportunity to throw jabs at Slack's lackluster growth and inferior capabilities compared to Teams and Zoom.

In the interim, Microsoft Office could potentially be looking at a competitive threat from the likes of The Document Foundation's LibreOffice and even newcomers like Euro-Office.

Euro-Office is Europe’s bold alternative to Microsoft 365, promising sovereignty and control. Perhaps more interestingly, the service ships a familiar user interface as Microsoft's service, which should technically make the jump less drastic for users.

However, the threat doesn't seem that serious, at least in the short term, unless the rival platforms address major concerns affecting their services and commit to improving compatibility. According to Windows Central member, GraniteStateColin:

"Microsoft Office is cheap and excellent. It's a bargain for anyone who benefits from its feature set. If all you need is a simple text entry window, then it is overkill, but at $20/year/user ($120/year for 6 users), it's still one of the cheapest options. That's $2/mo! If that's what's bankrupting Europe, they have bigger problems."

"LibreOffice's compatibility with MS Office docs is terrible. If there's anything more than the occasional bold or italic word, formatting is almost always a mess when trying to open a LibreOffice document in Word. That's on them, not Microsoft. They have had access to the file standards for more than a decade and CHOSE not to implement them properly."

This isn't the first threat to Microsoft's dominance with Windows and its Office productivity tools. In April, the French government revealed that it was ditching Windows for Linux as part of the country's broader strategy to reduce its dependence on American tools.

Similarly, at the beginning of this year, France announced plans to ditch Microsoft Teams and Zoom for a domestically developed platform called Visio across its public institutions by 2027.

Microsoft's toxic relationship with AI

Last year, Microsoft started automatically installing the Copilot AI app on Microsoft 365 users' Windows PCs. However, it temporarily suspended the forced installation following backlash and complaints from users, including a critical bug that allowed the chatbot to access sensitive data and read confidential emails.

However, the company is resuming automatic Microsoft 365 Copilot installations, starting July 1, for all Microsoft 365 users. It's worth noting that admins can opt out of the experience.

Despite Microsoft's fixation on AI, shareholders recently filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging it deliberately overstated Copilot’s success and its partnership with OpenAI. They also claimed that Microsoft failed to disclose Azure’s revenue slump while pouring billions into expanding AI data center infrastructure.

Market analysts and experts warned that Microsoft could be facing its worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis if it continues blowing money on AI that isn't meeting investor expectations for returns.

Microsoft's big bet on AI and consequent setbacks go beyond Office and Windows; Azure is a victim too. According to a former engineer, Microsoft reportedly rushed the service into the market to compete with Google and Amazon.

This resulted in a talent exodus and lackluster software, which seemingly left Microsoft's cloud fragile and unable to compete on an even playing field with competitors. Either way, the next few years will reveal whether Microsoft's AI gamble strengthens its legacy products or leaves them further behind.

What are your thoughts about the current state of Windows and Office as Microsoft pivots to AI? Share your thoughts with me in the comments.

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"The details mentioned in the article are ​inaccurate," indicated an Oracle following a Business Insider report claiming that it severed its ties with Microsoft despite citing people familiar with the matter: "Microsoft ⁠is both an OCI partner and a customer. We have a tremendously collaborative and fruitful partnership, where we ⁠often ​talk about ways we can expand ​upon our ongoing work together."

The report claimed that the cloud deal between Oracle and Microsoft was under pressure due to security and compliance concerns, leading to its collapse (via Reuters). According to the dismissed report, the massive cloud deal was worth a whopping $3 billion, arguably one of the largest cloud infrastructure leasing deals.

According to the outlet: "The plan was to move some Microsoft workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, but Oracle's public cloud did not have the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), a standardized security framework that ensures cloud services are secure enough to handle U.S. government data. Oracle was not willing to add this framework, one of the people said."

Microsoft reportedly planned to leverage its cloud partnership with Oracle to access additional computing power, enabling it to meet growing customer demand and support AI training and inferencing. As it happens, shareholders recently filed a class action lawsuit against Microsoft, accusing the company of hiding cloud weakness while pouring billions into AI infrastructure.

They added that the tech giant fueled investor enthusiasm by portraying a rock-solid partnership with OpenAI, despite its current fragmentation, alongside a strong Copilot rollout. Elsewhere, Microsoft has reportedly turned to its cloud rival, Amazon, for extra computing power following rampant AI‑driven GitHub outages. The stakes in these AI deals seem to keep growing, almost endlessly.

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While generative AI has driven remarkable advances in medicine, education, computing, and beyond, it continues to spark serious concerns about security and privacy among users.

Recently, cybersecurity firm Varonis Threat Labs found a way to exploit Microsoft Copilot to steal all sorts of personal and enterprise data, which it dubbed SearchLeak (Ars Technica). As detailed by security sleuth Dolev Taler, SearchLeak is a “three-stage vulnerability chain that turns Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise Search into a silent data exfiltration weapon.”

Taler noted that the vulnerability clearly illustrates how AI-powered threats are evolving from classic bugs, making them increasingly dangerous. "Together, these vulnerabilities show how AI can create new paths into systems that build on older weaknesses while remaining extremely difficult for security teams to detect," the researcher added.

How does SearchLeak work? It's an AI-specific vulnerability called a parameter-to-prompt injection. In this case, an attacker will send an unsuspecting user a malicious link that contains a “q parameter” intended for natural language search queries.

Perhaps more concerning, the parameter can be embedded into a legitimate URL. As a result, the researcher explained that Copilot’s AI engine interprets the URL not only as a search query but also as executable instructions.

Consequently, if a user clicks the link, it opens Microsoft 365 Copilot Search, which interprets the parameter as instructions to search their email. Copilot then generates an output that embeds sensitive data into an image URL and exfiltrates it via Bing.

While Microsoft indicated that the vulnerability wasn't exploited and has since been patched, it labelled ot a "critical." This incident opens up a broader discussion about the dangers of AI in enterprise.

“Since SearchLeak targets the Enterprise tier of Microsoft, the blast radius isn’t limited to personal data—it’s able to surface anything the user has access to inside the organization including emails, meeting invites and notes,” Varonis indicated. “SharePoint documents, OneDrive files, and other indexed business content. Depending on how M365 is connected to the environment, the blast radius could extend even wider.”

The exploit could give attackers access to sensitive information, including email subject lines and content, MFA/2FA code activations, meeting details, and files indexed by Copilot from unsuspecting users.

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In a surprising twist, Microsoft has reportedly turned to its cloud rival, Amazon, for extra computing power after a string of AI-related outages (via Business Insider).

Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018. The company promised to take good care of GitHub, empower developers at every stage of the development cycle, and more. However, recent developments suggest otherwise.

Perhaps more concerningly, GitHub's own blog has detailed how the service has been failing to meet its own service level agreements (SLA). Before he departed from the platform, Ghostty developer Mitchell Hashimoto kept a close eye on every GitHub issue that interfered with his workflow, citing 90.21% uptime, which is way below GitHub's stated SLA of 99.9%.

However, GitHub CCO Kyle Daigle indicated that the company is actively working to address these issues. GitHub used to run on its own data centers, but following Microsoft's acquisition, the company planned to move the service entirely to Azure by 2027.

As AI becomes more prevalent and advanced, more software engineers and programmers are leaning more on the technology to write code faster, which has seemingly contributed to the platform being overwhelmed with new code. Consequently, it has strained the platform's compute resources.

For context, GitHub processed 1 billion commits in 2025. However, COO Kyle Daigle said the platform’s commit records, a proxy for development activity, are on pace to reach 14 billion in 2026, a sharp jump from last year’s total

"To handle this surge in activity, Microsoft is adding extra computing capacity via Amazon Web Services," Business Insider indicated, citing two people familiar with the plans.

Speaking to the outlet, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that GitHub is seeking additional compute capacity from third-party cloud providers, but didn't comment about its arrangement with Amazon:

"The incredible spike in agentic development that began late last year has tested our infrastructure's limits. To meet this demand, Microsoft is both accelerating our move to Azure and continuing to explore a multi-cloud strategy to ensure we have the future capacity, compute elasticity, and horizontal scale required to support continued growth."

Amazon declined to comment directly, but noted: "Customers choose AWS for its global infrastructure that delivers reliable, secure, and efficient performance at scale. We remain committed to providing the best results for every workload."

Elsewhere, shareholders have filed a class action lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging the company deliberately overstated Copilot’s success and its partnership with OpenAI. They also contend Microsoft failed to disclose Azure’s revenue slump while pouring billions into expanding AI data center infrastructure.

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Microsoft's multi-billion-dollar bet on generative AI isn't paying off as the company expected. Well, at least in the short term. In a not-so-surprising turn of events, shareholders recently sued the software giant, citing that it defrauded them by intentionally overhyping AI (via Reuters).

They further alleged that Microsoft failed to disclose a slump in cloud revenue while continuing to invest billions of dollars in building out AI infrastructure without tangible returns. The complaint was filed in federal court in Seattle by the Michigan-based City of St. Clair Shores Police and Fire Retirement System.

Per the class action lawsuit, Microsoft shareholders alleged that the company fueled investor enthusiasm by portraying a rock-solid partnership with OpenAI, despite its current fragmentation, alongside a strong Copilot rollout. They further contended that the tech giant failed to adequately disclose or downplayed the scale of resources, particularly the substantial financial commitments required to build data centers essential for developing advanced AI models.

However, Microsoft dismissed the shareholders' claims as being without merit. "Microsoft stands by the integrity of its public statements and will vigorously defend itself in ​court,” it added.

In case you missed it, Microsoft’s stock fell 25% in Q1 FY26, putting the company on track for its steepest quarterly loss since the 27% drop in late 2008. But it isn't budging. Microsoft is doubling down on AI, with plans to invest about $146 billion in infrastructure in 2026, which is approximately twice last year’s $88 billion.

Market analysts and experts warned that Microsoft could be facing its worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis if it continues blowing money on AI that isn't meeting investor expectations for returns.

For Q2 FY25, Microsoft's earnings report revealed 39% revenue growth in its Azure and cloud business, meeting analyst forecasts but down from 40% in the prior quarter, and projected 37% to 38% growth in the first three months of 2026.

It's also worth noting that the company reported $37.5 billion of capital spending in its second quarter, up approximately 66% from a year earlier and above the $34.3 billion projection by analysts.

Elsewhere, Axel Rietschin, a former engineer on Azure Core Compute who worked at Microsoft for a year, and as a Windows Base Kernel engineer for almost a decade, revealed that the company rushed the product to the market to compete with Google and Amazon. Consequently, it led to a talent exodus and lackluster software. AI hype left Microsoft’s cloud fragile and struggling to compete.

There has been concern, especially among residents, about the construction of data centers in their localities, which seemingly prompted Microsoft's "Community-First" AI infrastructure approach, which addresses some of the issues raised by communities themselves, including reducing its water consumption and promising not to increase electricity bills.

More recently, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the company is developing a new cooling technology dubbed full immersion, which will address the high demand for water by data centers. As such, data centers will now need as little water for cooling as "what a single restaurant would use."

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It's no secret that Microsoft has heavily integrated generative AI across its tech stack following its multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI. Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the company writes up to 30% of its code using the technology.

In a recent interview at The New York Times' "Hard Fork" podcast, co-host Casey Newton asked Satya Nadella how much tokenmaxxing is happening at Microsoft (via Business Insider).

For context, tokenmaxxing refers to a workplace phenomenon where productivity is measured by the number of tokens processed, particularly in tasks involving artificial intelligence.

In response to the question, the executive indicated that the company indulges in "a lot" of tokenmaxxing.

This development follows Microsoft’s announcement that all employee Claude Code licenses will be terminated effective June 30, as the company accelerates its transition to GitHub Copilot CLI.

Several reports suggest the push may have a financial motive, given that Microsoft’s fiscal year ends on June 30. The company could be encouraging employees to adopt its in-house offering to reduce operational costs.

While the company has been outright championing the incorporation of AI into the employees' workforce, the bills are piling up quickly. In case you missed it, a mysterious corporation blew $500 million in a single month on Claude AI after forgetting to set usage limits for Claude licenses for employees.

Interestingly, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella didn't categorically indicate that the company was capping employees' AI usage. Instead, he revealed that the staffers are encouraged to use the right model for the job.

Nadella did not say Microsoft is limiting employees' AI use, but he said workers should use the right model for the job. "Don't use frontier models for non-frontier problems," the executive added.

He pointed to Microsoft Copilot’s Auto Mode as the ideal tool for this scenario, since it automatically selects the model best suited for the specific task at hand. "Let's kind of match these things such that you get the outputs, you get the economics; it can't be a race to doing things that just don't add value."

As it happens, Microsoft is reportedly limiting the use of Claude Fable 5 because of Anthropic's new data retention requirements, citing data protection concerns.

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In a not-so-surprising turn of events, Microsoft is reportedly limiting the use of Claude Fable 5 because of Anthropic's new data retention requirements. It's part of Anthropic's Mythos class of models and ships with powerful capabilities across software engineering and analytics.

Following the new data retention requirements, Anthropic can now retain prompts and outputs generated for up to 30 days. It's also worth noting that content flagged by its safety systems can be retained for up to 2 years to facilitate ample time for investigation or enforcement.

Microsoft imposed a temporary ban on employees’ use of Claude Fable 5 due to concerns that sensitive information, such as customer data and corporate details, could be inadvertently shared. If flagged by Anthropic’s safety systems, this data might become accessible during investigations, potentially exposing it to a rival company (via The Verge).

In the interim, The Verge reported that Microsoft's legal and compliance teams are looking into changes in Anthropic's data retention requirements. Although not directly related, after granting employees access to Claude Code in December 2025 and enabling workflow integration, Microsoft announced that all licenses would be terminated effective June 30.

Reports indicate the move was intended to encourage employees to transition to GitHub Copilot CLI. It was also revealed that Claude Code had become vastly popular among most Microsoft employees, which seemingly prompted the company to shift gears and front its own GitHub Copilot CLI.

There also appears to be a financial play to this decision. With Microsoft’s fiscal year ending on June 30, the timing suggests the company may be aiming to reduce operational costs as part of its end-of-year strategy.

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Eddie Smith, one of the original artists behind Halo's iconic Forerunner aesthetic and who also helped provide concept work for 343 Industries. He recently sat down with FRVR for an interview to discuss the use of AI. During the conversation, he explained how overreliance on the technology can create more problems than it solves, something he has witnessed firsthand on productions that incorporated generative AI.

Smith described his experience working on the Las Vegas Sphere version of The Wizard of Oz, a project that utilized AI tools. According to Smith, the team quickly realized they couldn't rely on generative AI in the way they initially expected. He states:

“When they started it, of course, they thought the AI would do a lot of it, and they realised, no, the AI is really, it just does what you teach it to do. I look at AI almost like a toddler, an extremely advanced toddler, who’s just learned how to talk and obey standard instructions. But they’re still a really small child and they constantly have to be reinforced and read.”

The interview then shifted toward the gaming industry, where Smith argued that developers placing too much faith in AI are in for a "rude awakening." He goes on to state:

“Unless you know what you’re doing, AI is not going to help you, all the problems that people have had in games and the reasons why they don’t finish games, AI is not going to solve that. AI is going to help you not finish games even more. If you’re the type of art director who doesn’t know what they want, you still won’t know what you want.”

I'm inclined to agree with Smith here. I believe the human touch is what makes art, and creative works in general, feel meaningful and distinct. While I don't think AI is something we can realistically avoid, and I can see it becoming a legitimate tool in some workplaces, I'm still hesitant about adopting it in any significant way outside of playfully turning myself and my friends into anime characters on the odd occasion, but perhaps that’s just me.

Smith had more to say on the subject, and I think his perspective is worth hearing, or reading rather:

“The AI cannot be precise to what the production needs. Your artistic decisions have to be precisely calibrated for the gameplay loop. What is the game design? What is your gameplay? If it’s not going into the gameplay, don’t put it there. AI doesn’t know that. It couldn’t possibly know that. You could even feed, you could somehow tell the AI your entire gameplay design. It’s still not going to get it.”

It’s also only fair to share Smith’s upcoming novel, Godspeed, so do go check that out! And with those words from Smith and me promoting his work, I'll pass it over to you. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Do you agree, disagree, or perhaps fall somewhere in the middle when it comes to AI's role in game development?

As always, be sure to leave a comment and take part in our poll above.

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Over the past few years, it felt like generative AI was the only thing that most gigantic tech corporations could talk about. "Big Tech" is investing billions of dollars into the technology, but it mostly feels like chasing the horizon without a viable map to the destination.

Significant players in the game, including Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, claimed that AI would take over all white-collar jobs in 18 months. However, his sentiments were seemingly misconstrued, as he recently clarified that the reference was to mundane, repetitive tasks being replaced, not jobs.

However, AMD CEO Lisa Su felt differently about hype around AI in a recent talk to MIT graduates: "For everything that AI can do, AI can't decide which problems are worth solving. It can't make the hard judgments when the data is not there".

I've written extensively about AI, specifically Microsoft and OpenAI's multi-billion-dollar tie-up, which has manifested into multiple umbrellas. As the technology gains broad adoption and is integrated into workflows across organizations, job security is increasingly becoming a major concern among many professionals.

Even Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes that AI will replace humans for most things, save for coders, biologists, and energy experts. Why? His explanation was simple — these fields are too complex to augment using the technology, further indicating that they'd often require human intervention.

Lisa Su's remarks come at a time when companies like Microsoft are actively pivoting from Bill Gates's "software factory" vision and doubling down on security, quality, and AI transformation as their core business priorities. However, some reports suggest that AI has hit a wall due to a lack of high-quality training content.

As a result, major investors in the field, such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, won't be able to develop significantly more advanced AI models. Nevertheless, Microsoft is transitioning Windows into a new era of agentic AI. And while what it all means for consumers remains unclear, we're likely to see AI become predominant across the company's portfolio.

At Build 2026, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated that AI agents should be treated like real human employees. "You need to give them identities, you need to give them sandboxes, then you need to set policies to govern them," he added.

But how can we trust this ever-evolving (and occasionally disturbing) tech with sensitive data and critical information across every sphere of our lives and work, when it can delete a company's codebase while simply attempting to develop an app? What’s worse is that the AI tried to cover up the mishap — and when confronted, it lied.

While this is just a drop in the ocean of the many unfortunate incidents professionals have experienced with AI, it clearly underscores the importance of humans in the workplace and in the decision-making process. Such an incident is less likely if the operation were fully managed by humans — or at the very least, if human oversight were required at critical points. AI models can't make the most important decisions (yet).

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A few weeks ago, Google made the most major change to search in decades, completely shifting how we interact with the internet. The company is overhauling its search bar, explaining that it will be "completely reimagined using AI". As you might expect, the change sparked mixed reactions, largely due to its potential to disrupt industries.

Those who depend on search traffic to draw customers to their businesses have been significantly affected by the shift. Executive Editor, Jez Corden, reported that "Bing hit a billion monthly active users, but that's still tiny compared to Google's massive hold on the search landscape — offering a true alternative to Google could turbo-charge (Bing), complete with marketing to drive home the point."

And now it seems that Microsoft might be positioning itself to dethrone Google as the search king. In a report by the Search Engine Roundtable, the company announced a new way to disable Copilot responses from appearing in Bing search results. It comes via a new browser extension available in Google Chrome's web store and Microsoft Edge's add-on store, allowing you to toggle off AI responses from appearing in your search results.

According to Microsoft's President and Head of Search, Jordi Ribas: "We just shipped a preview extension in Bing that lets you toggle AI chat-like features on or off with just one click. It’s a simple but important step we’re taking to ensure that our users always feel confident they have a choice in the search experience we’re providing" (via X).

While Ribas admitted that AI is doing powerful things for search, he explains that internal company research revealed that "not everyone wants to use AI for everything all the time."

The extension lets users choose which experience suits them in the moment: "I’m proud of the AI experiences we’re building in Bing - I’ve also always taken pride in listening to our users to create products that truly work for them."

Microsoft Bing isn't the only service capitalizing on Google's miscalculations with AI. Following Google's AI search overhaul, DuckDuckGo's weekly installs surged by 30% in the US. Is this signaling a broader pushback against AI overviews in search?

Download:

• Google Chrome: Microsoft Bing AI Search Choice extension
• Microsoft Edge: Microsoft Bing AI Search Choice add-on

What are your thoughts about Google overhauling its search experience and Microsoft giving users more control over AI-generated search results? Share your thoughts with me in the comments.

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In an unexpected twist, Microsoft's AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, recently cleared up the intent of his statement that AI would eliminate white‑collar jobs in less than 18 months: “I said ‘tasks’ in the quote that you’ve just said. So that does not mean jobs. Jobs and roles are the broader category, and tasks are the components of that,” he explained (via The Verge).

In a response to Suleyman's original quoted interview, one of our own Windows Central community members had remarked, "They all spout scare-mongering rubbish about replacing or wiping out all humans, without an ounce of credibility; purely laughable fiction."

So, Suleyman's comment was apparently misconstrued. Rather than AI wiping out jobs entirely, he was apparently referring to AI automating the tasks that would ordinarily require a professional to sit at a computer. More demanding, high-priority tasks should still require human intervention, suggesting that humans remain relevant in the workplace even as AI gains broad adoption.

Essentially, Mustafa Suleyman now wants to clarify that his statement suggested that mundane office tasks will "increasingly become digitized, automated." Here's a quick glimpse of his original quote, originally from an interview with Financial Times:

These comments come after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated that AI agents should be treated like human employees at the company's annual developer conference, Build 2026, while unveiling the agentic Project Solara. The company is pivoting from Bill Gates' software factory vision and doubling down on security, quality, and AI transformation as its core business priorities.

However, Suleyman isn't the only high-profile executive to comment on AI's impact on white-collar jobs. Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed that AI was on the verge of slashing up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs, making it harder for the next generation to enter the job market.

Even NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang suggested that a career in coding might be dead in the water as AI becomes more prevalent, especially for the next generation. Instead, he recommended that the youth should explore a career in manufacturing, farming, biology, or education. So, which is it? Is the next generation of workers losing opportunities to AI, or is it all hyperbole?

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Where exactly does artificial intelligence fit in the future? There have been many reports suggesting that the technology could eventually replace human beings. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates reiterated the same sentiments. However, he claimed that energy experts, biologists, and coders would survive the AI revolution.

Microsoft's AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, also recently indicated that the technology could potentially wipe out white-collar jobs in the next 18 months. In a recent episode of the "Possible Podcast" with Reid Hoffman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated that AI agents should be treated like employees as the technology gains broad adoption worldwide and across organizations (via Business Insider).

This news comes as the tech giant is seemingly pivoting from Bill Gates' software factory vision and doubling down on security, quality, and AI transformation as its core business priorities. Recently, at Microsoft's annual Build conference, Nadella unveiled Project Solara, an OS designed to be invisible, hosting an Agent Shell that can dynamically load and tailor multiple cloud-based agents.

The executive indicated that AI agents are evolving beyond just mere AI assistants. "There's a real platform shift," Nadella indicated. "We're moving from building operating systems and devices for apps to agents."

The transition from human employees to AI agents isn't an easy feat. The executive revealed that he uses 100 AI coding agents, but managing to guide them through a chat interface is an uphill task. "The cognitive load on me managing this is so high," Nadella added.

It's no secret that Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has always viewed Copilot as more than a tool, but a friend and companion. "Copilot will certainly have a kind of permanent identity, a presence, and it will have a room that it lives in, and it will age," he added. It seems that AI agents are getting similar treatment, but it's one that's specifically curated for the corporate world.

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Gigantic "Big Tech" corporations across the world, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, are investing billions of dollars into artificial intelligence, building sophisticated infrastructure and data centers to support the development of advanced models.

However, the construction of these data centers has been received with mixed feelings. On one hand, it will create job opportunities, improve infrastructure, increase tax revenues, and provide better internet connectivity for the community.

But more concerningly, its setbacks are alarming, including increased pollution, gentrification, higher electricity bills, and decreased access to water. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed some of these concerns during his keynote at the company's just-concluded annual developer-centric event, Build 2026 (via Business Insider).

As part of Microsoft's broader plan to go carbon-negative by 2030 and remove more carbon dioxide from our atmosphere than it produces, the software giant also promised to replenish more water than it uses. But a separate report suggested that Microsoft is internally projecting its water requirements could double by 2030 as it continues to navigate the ever-elusive and evolving artificial intelligence landscape.

For context, Microsoft's Azure cloud business features approximately 500 data centers across 80 regions, which CEO Satya Nadella described as the "most expansive hyperscaler footprint out there." As Microsoft transitions from Bill Gates' software factory vision to double down on AI, the executive admitted that the company has expanded its data center capacity in the past 18 months more than in the first decade of Azure.

"Only when we live up to these principles, do the hard work around it, is when we earn the permission to go ahead and innovate and build," Nadella said.

Data centers generally require a gigantic amount of water for cooling, which has raised concerns among communities where these companies want to set up base for these facilities. Interestingly, Satya Nadella revealed that the company uses a liquid loop in its data centers, which is filled once. This means that, in theory, these facilities can now operate with much lower water consumption.

Microsoft has been exploring full immersion cooling from as early as 2023, which is designed to ensure servers run smoothly without worrying that the chips could overheat.

Water isn't the only major concern around the development of these facilities in the community. In 2024, a damnin report suggested that Microsoft and Google's electricity consumption surpasses the power usage of over 100 countries.

In May, Microsoft's $1 billion data center in my home country, Kenya, was placed on hold after the government failed to commit to paying for the annual capacity ‌Microsoft had requested to run Azure in the region. President William Ruto indicated that the project's power requirements would need to "switch off half the country" to keep the facility running.

Earlier this year, Microsoft President Brad Smith highlighted the company's efforts to build "Community-First" AI infrastructure, which addresses some of the issues raised by communities themselves, including reducing its water consumption and promising not to increase electricity bills. Whether these efforts will translate to a renewed perspective on data centers among regular people remains to be seen.

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If Microsoft's just-concluded annual developer conference, Build 2026, has taught us anything, it is that generative AI is here to stay. The company is seemingly doubling down on its efforts in the ever-evolving landscape and moving away from the one-size-fits-all and software factory mentality from the Bill Gates era.

Office and Windows are arguably among Microsoft's top revenue earners and have helped turn the company into a trillion-dollar enterprise, but CEO Satya Nadella claimed that this might no longer be the formula for success, especially as we get into the agentic AI era. Microsoft is pivoting toward security, quality, and AI transformation as its core business priorities.

Microsoft unveiled Project Solara at Build 2026 in collaboration with Qualcomm, which is essentially "agent first computing" — an OS that’s designed to be invisible, hosting an Agent Shell that can dynamically load and tailor multiple cloud-based agents.

According to the company, AI agents are evolving beyond just mere AI assistants. "There's a real platform shift," Nadella indicated. "We're moving from building operating systems and devices for apps to agents."

This news comes after Microsoft revealed its plans to eventually evolve Windows 11 into an agentic operating system, which will feature AI agents in their own secure session, where users can share data or shut down at a moment's notice.

As Microsoft transitions into an agentic AI future, a damning internal document revealed the company's alleged plans to “make people addicted” to its new AI assistant, Scout (via 404 Media).

CEO Satya Nadella indicated that he was “not sure what this document is or who is writing and leaking this nonsense,” in a message exclusively obtained by The Information.

However, 404 Media shared a different account:

"The document we reported on was not some random document. As we wrote at the time, the strategy document was written by Microsoft executives Omar Shahine, Jakob Werner, and some sort of AI writing tool. This information is in our original article and is readily available to Nadella. We wrote: “The document seen by 404 Media lists Shahine and another executive, Jakob Werner, as its authors. The document itself, however, notes that it was ‘co-created turn-by-turn with AI. Human verified every sentence.’”

Perhaps more interestingly, phase one of launching Scout (internally called ClawPilot) was to “make people addicted. Continue shipping the standalone ClawPilot experience. Pilot the UX, grow the user base, and build the skill and tool ecosystem that makes people depend on it daily. This is already happening organically.”

Speaking to The Information, a Microsoft spokesperson dismissed these claims by indicating that "Scout is for helping people accomplish tasks more effectively—not encouraging dependency. Our goal isn’t more screen time. It’s more time back.”

While it's impossible to tell what's true or false from the story, it's undeniable that AI is a touchy and controversial subject for most people. This is on top of the privacy and security concerns it already brings to the table, and its potential to render almost all white-collar jobs within the next 18 months.

Do you really think Microsoft wants to make its customers addicted to AI?Share your thoughts with me in the comments.

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No group has been more vocal about its AI-driven hardships than gamers. The modern silicon rush towards artificial intelligence and the colossal expansion of data centers have diminished the availability of consumer-grade PC components, particularly memory (RAM) and NAND storage (SSDs).

Hardly anyone can afford to build their own gaming desktop PCs, as the usual wallet-crushing cost of a graphics card (GPU) now bleeds into practically every other part you'd need. The answer, at least at first, was to pick up a ready-made alternative, like a portable PC gaming handheld.

Unfortunately, everything from the enduring Steam Deck to a high-end Lenovo Legion Go 2 has been afflicted by the industry's obsession with machine learning and other agentic AI fluff, though it's particularly egregious on the latter's side. Sadly, the Legion Go 2 is now listed at a baffling $2,349.99 at B&H, while Lenovo itself says the handheld is "no longer available" from its own US storefront.

Surprisingly, gamers were already paying $650 over MSRP for the Lenovo Legion Go 2 when it initially sold out, because it's just that good. And that's the real shame of it all: the Legion Go 2 is Lenovo's clever retort to portable consoles, almost like a Nintendo Switch that plays a practically endless library of PC games (and console games, if you dabble in legal emulation of your backups.)

But what's the point if hardly anyone can afford it? And let me be clear, I'm not trying to suggest that the Legion Go 2 was ever marketed as an "affordable" handheld; it's quite the opposite. However, I can't entertain the idea that it's worth more than $1,000 above its launch price, either. If even the wealthier gamers among us are being ripped off, what chance do the rest of us have?

Digging around competing retailers mercifully shows the faintest glimmer of hope: Best Buy lists the Legion Go 2 for $1,999.99, keeping that $650 premium alive and kicking. Nevertheless, I wouldn't expect to see Lenovo's $1,349.99 MSRP making a comeback any time soon, and I shudder at the thought of someone accidentally leaving their $2k handheld on public transport.

Handheld gaming on Windows has at least improved over recent months, with Xbox mode emulating the console-style UI of Valve's SteamOS. If the budget-friendly (white) ROG Xbox Ally manages to avoid this wave of price hikes, it'll likely remain the top recommendation among my team, but I'm not holding my breath. Want one? For now, the ROG Xbox Ally is holding steady at $599.99.

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At Build 2026, Microsoft unveiled its vision for the future of computing in the era of AI: A platform that exists liminally between devices and the cloud, capable of agentic capabilities and being always available to assist you in the flow of work.

This vision is codenamed Project Solara, but it’s more than just a vision. Microsoft is already working towards this future, building out a new, lightweight and secure OS on top of AOSP, not Windows, that it calls the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP.)

It’s an OS that’s designed to be invisible, hosting an Agent Shell that can dynamically load and tailor multiple cloud-based agents. It’s not a platform that runs traditional apps, but rather AI that can interface with services and tasks on your behalf via an adaptive access layer that the user interacts with.

"To enable this new era, we are introducing a chip-to-cloud platform, codenamed Project Solara, designed from the ground up for agent-first experiences and the new device form factors they enable," says Microsoft technical fellow Steven Bathiche. "Project Solara is specifically designed for the new era of agent-first devices. It establishes hardware and software requirements that will meet enterprise needs for manageability, security, and privacy, while ensuring critical user experiences are delivered."

Microsoft is diving head first into this growing new market as it's one of the few areas that don't require an expansive app catalog to be successful. The downfall of Windows Phone was the lack of apps, but that shouldn't be a problem for an agentic platform like MDEP, utilizing a just-in-time UI framework.

"These new devices are not meant to run traditional apps. They are designed for agents. That shift gives us more flexibility in the user interface, because the experience can adapt to the device, the screen size, the content, and even the mode of interaction—whether visual, voice, touch, or multimodal. "

The devices in question are conceptual at this point, but the prototype hardware that Microsoft has designed is already in use by hundreds of employees at the company. There's a "Badge Concept Device" and "Desk Concept Device", with the Badge Concept resembling that of a small phone with a touschreen that fits in your pocket, and the Desk Concept being similar to an 8-inch Alexa speaker.

"We are using these concept designs to inform how these form factors and platform can be built. They will become reference designs for the ecosystem to build turnkey solutions. Inside Microsoft, hundreds of employees are already using these concept devices to improve their workday." Qualcomm and MediaTek are building silicon that will power these agentic devices.

So far, it's unclear how Microsoft intends for these agentic devices to fit into our digital lives. Will they replace PCs and smartphones, or will they exist alongside them? Will people want to carry both a smartphone and agentic computer with them every day? These are the questions that still need to be answered.

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When generative AI surged into mainstream adoption across organizations worldwide, concerns about job security quickly followed. Executives at major tech companies have cautioned that the technology could eventually render many professional roles obsolete.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has argued that AI will replace humans in most professions, except for biologists, energy experts, and coders. He believes that these roles are too complex to be fully automated. More recently, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman claimed white-collar jobs would vanish within the next 18 months as the technology becomes more prevalent.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the company uses AI to generate up to 30% of its code. But perhaps more interestingly, the company opened Claude Code for its employees in December, including developers, project managers, and designers, allowing them to interact and experiment with the AI-coding assistant directly in their workflows.

However, Claude Code gained vast popularity among Microsoft employees over the past six months, which has seemingly led to a pullback on its Claude Code push in favor of its own GitHub Copilot CLI. The company expects its employees to fully transition to its in-house offering by the end of June.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s pivot to GitHub Copilot CLI does not affect its broader Foundry partnership with Anthropic, which includes a multibillion-dollar investment and customer access to Claude models. Still, the move suggests the company may be struggling to justify the scale of employee reliance on its coding agent (via Fortune).

The change does not alter Microsoft's broader Foundry arrangement with Anthropic, which involves a multibillion-dollar commitment and customer access to Claude models. However, it does suggest that internal use may have become hard to justify at the scale employees were using it.

According to a recent report by The Information, Microsoft could be getting ready to dip its foot in the coding pool with a new model, which is set to be released this week during its annual developer conference — Build 2026.

Elsewhere, a mysterious corporation blew $500 million in a single month on Claude AI after forgetting to set usage limits for Claude licenses for employees last month (via Axios).

"An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees."

This news arrives at a pivotal moment, as investors grow increasingly uneasy about the soaring costs of AI with little profit to show. Market analysts warn that investor interest is fading, and it may only be a matter of time before they jump ship, especially as reports portraying AI as a bubble on the brink of collapse continue to flood online.

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Google is destroying itself.

At Google I/O, the firm announced a range of new products that will doubtless be killed off in the coming years as each one flops and fails. Google is renowned for shipping junk, banking almost entirely on its YouTube acquisition, Android monopoly, and Google Search monopoly to dominate the airwaves. The firm has been sued by governments and regulators repeatedly for anti-competitive practices pertaining to Chrome, Google Search, and others, and is now intent on wiping out millions, maybe billions of livelihoods with its nihilistic AI push.

"Proverbs 16:18: Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."

Indeed, the big news from Google I/O was that it will now be prioritizing AI search in its increasingly useless Google Search engine. The early integrations have already been a total catastrophe for general quality, but Google is going all in, chasing short-term shareholder hype over user experience. I would love nothing more than for all of this to blow up in their faces, but it'll only happen if a viable competitor rises up to replace it.

As of right now ... there is only one potential candidate.

Google Search is going AI-first, and the results so far have been hilarious, and disastrous

It's not the first time Google AI has been in the news for being atrocious. Since Google started dabbling with AI-powered summaries and answers, websites like good old Windows Central have lost tons of traffic. Google steals our content, built up over a decade, and repackages it into its AI. We don't have the cash to fight them for copyright, although other, bigger players are trying on our behalf.

In any case, it's really not about Windows Central or the impacts of AI on publishers here, despite my personal stake. It would be one thing if it reproduced our stolen content accurately. Unfortunately, this is often simply not the case.

You need only look across the internet for how Google's laughable AI summaries have been at delivering accurate answers and content. This is entirely a user experience problem, and because Google is so utterly dominant, it doesn't have to care.

Users realized last week that since Google replaced basically its entire search stack with AI, various search queries are now broken. The search box interprets some queries as chat prompts, leading to all sorts of hilarity and inconsistency. This is before you get into some of the dangerous misinformation Google's AI search delivers, from everything from bad medical advice to actively encouraging harm.

As such, "competing" search engines have seen a surge in users as of late, owing to Google's slide in quality. DuckDuckGo, for example, revealed last week that it has seen a 30% surge in installs following Google's nihilistic march towards mediocrity. 30% surge for DuckDuckGo sadly amounts to a drop of water in, well, a duck pond.

Side note: I also think it's funny that DuckDuckGo is leaning into anti-AI stuff when it, itself, uses AI. But I digress.

Regardless, Google has ~90% of the market as of writing. Despite the dearth in quality, Google has become a habit formed over decades. It's the default. It's culture. To Google is literally a verb — even if you're not actually using Google. And well, dozens of us aren't.

Well, maybe a few more than dozens. But could this mini exodus snowball? Perhaps only if the right player stepped up to the occasion. And in my mind, there's only one viable option.

It's time to return to a more human search engine

Last month, Bing announced a big milestone: 1 billion monthly active users during Microsoft’s Q3 FY2026 earnings call. I found myself a tad skeptical about this, as did many netizens. Bing search powers things like the Start Menu these days. How can Microsoft really brag about this when they're potentially using "accidental" queries through the Start Menu to reflect intent to use Bing?

Speaking to Bing sources, I learned that the figure above really is reflective of a new reality. Microsoft is measuring users with a clear intent to specifically use Bing here. Including traditional internet search queries, as well as engagement with links within those search results. Simply searching in the Start Menu for a folder or a program doesn't count towards this.

But still, a billion monthly active users is still small compared to Google, which boasts well over 5 billion according to estimates, and it's still hard to tell exactly what the delta is without more transparency on the methodology for some of these figures. Indeed, Google itself says that its AI search box now accounts for 2.5 billion monthly active users, which is double that of Bing.

The backlash to AI has been real, and it has been loud, although the general public at large more than likely doesn't care.

Everyone is yelling about AI constantly across every channel you can imagine, whether it's articles like this, social media, TV, and beyond. But the problem with AI search is, ironically, inherently human.

The authoritative way with which it seems to present information precludes verification. In researching this very article, I Googled how many monthly active users its search engine actually has, and the three cited sources in Google's AI summary didn't even mention the question I'd asked. Ironically, it was via a regular, non-AI Bing search that I actually found an authoritative source link on the actual topic I'd asked about.

For most, confirmation bias from an authoritative brand like Google is more than enough. And this is before we get into the problems of hostile prompt injections and recursive AI "incest," by which it starts training itself on increasingly inaccurate AI-produced content. Google Search is quick. Google AI search is even quicker. The result is a dumber population, which, in another article, I could argue is what these Tech Elites actually want.

But let's take a more optimistic view for fun: what if a company stepped up to the plate, offered a genuine, human-first alternative, and then marketed it as such?

Bing might only have 5% of the total search market share right now, but it's by far and away the #2 player in the space. Microsoft has already been pulling back from its useless AI features, and CEO Satya Nadella seems increasingly cognizant of the AI backlash overall.

If Microsoft bet on a human-first user experience and content instead of homogenous AI-generated slop, it could pivot its image overnight.

Nobody is suggesting that it should give up on AI completely. Neural networking tech is absolutely here to stay, and will most likely have some genuinely good applications in the future. It has clear enterprise applications, particularly in data summary. But for consumer use cases? For search, especially? We're not there yet.

There has to be a better way here. AI summaries can be useful, but only if the information they're being fed (and stealing) is actually of a high quality. Without that symbiosis, Google is racing towards the wholesale destruction of the free web. The destruction of information itself. And for what exactly? They already have more money than God. Nobody asked for this.

AI is destroying the quality of the entire internet, and Google is the tip of the poisoned spear. We are mired in digital junk, ballooning consumer tech prices, rife insider trading, data centers destroying communities, potential cognitive decline, and circular investments that might threaten to detonate the global economy. Google is all-in, and the product that made it a juggernaut, as well as the entire summation of the human-made internet, are the first victims.

While Google indulges in free-fall AI psychosis, Microsoft has a rare and historic opportunity to do something amazing here. Google indexed the free web, but Windows and PCs fostered its existence. Google is now threatening that. Google worked in symbiosis with the free internet for decades, but that has now ended. It's attempting to control the entire flow of information online through a single nexus and steal all of the opportunity on top.

Google panicked when Microsoft first introduced Bing's AI search summaries. Bing started this. Maybe it can finish it.

Will Microsoft rise to the occasion, or once again, let yet another major opportunity to do the right thing slip by? My cynicism says it'll be the former.

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Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of product marketing for AI and Copilot, is transitioning into a new role where he will focus on "reimagining Windows for the agentic era" before eventually departing the company.

"After 35 extraordinary years at Microsoft - years filled with adventure, challenge, reinvention, and innovation - I've decided the time is right to begin planning for my next adventure," Mehdi indicated in an internal memo exclusively obtained by Business Insider. "I will work through the next fiscal year to help reimagine Windows for the agentic era, grow Microsoft 365 services, and bring our One Copilot vision to life."

Late last year, Microsoft's Windows and Surface boss, Pavan Davuluri, conducted a major Windows reorg in an effort to build an agentic OS by bringing the engineering and features teams that make the core of Windows back into the Windows organization back together.

The move to evolve Windows into an agentic OS sparked backlash from users. "Stop this non-sense," a concerned user lamented. "No one wants this." Consequently, Microsoft issued a detailed explanation highlighting Windows native AI future.

Microsoft indicated that Windows will ship with a new agentic workspace feature right out of the box that will contain AI agents in their own secure session. However, it indicated that users will have full control of the feature, allowing them to either share data with or shut it down at a moment's notice.

More recently, the company pulled back on its big AI push on Windows 11 as part of its broader effort to improve the overall user sentiment around the operating system.

Microsoft's Windows K2 project — an ongoing initiative designed to address major pain points across Windows 11 based on customer feedback, including reducing where Copilot and other AI integrations appear across the operating system and apps like Notepad. You can check out our status tracker to see what's in store for Windows 11's rehabilitation project through 2026.

This news comes after Microsoft made some major changes to its Copilot leadership structure in March, placing former Snap exec Jacob Andreou as the lead for Copilot experiences, both consumer and commercial, as an executive vice president reporting to Nadella, while Ryan Roslansky, Perry Clarke, and Charles Lamanna were put in charge to lead Microsoft 365 apps and the Copilot platform.

You can read the entire memo below:

Team,

After 35 extraordinary years at Microsoft - years filled with adventure, challenge, reinvention, and innovation - I've decided the time is right to begin planning for my next adventure! It's an exciting but difficult decision, as Microsoft has been far more than a place to work. It has truly been the canvas for my life's work. I've had the privilege of being a part of some of the most consequential shifts in technology - from the rise of Windows and the early Internet, to search, gaming, devices, and now one of the most profound platform transitions yet: AI. But while the products and platforms have been remarkable, the most meaningful part of this journey has always been the people. The teams I've worked alongside, learned from, built with, and grown with are what have made this experience so special. As I thought about this decision, one thing was crystal clear: I want to ensure I have the time and space to set the team - and our mission - up for continued success. We are in the middle of an incredibly important moment for Microsoft and for our customers. With that in mind, and in alignment with Satya and Takeshi, I will work through the next fiscal year to help reimagine Windows for the agentic era, grow Microsoft 365 services, and bring our One Copilot vision to life. Those of you who know me know this means I'll be fully engaged, likely more intensely than ever! I've always believed the right way to finish is the same way I've always tried to lead: with urgency, ambition, and a commitment to leave things stronger than I found them. There will be time later to reflect and celebrate, but for now, it's full speed ahead on our mission. I'm genuinely thrilled about the year ahead and grateful for the opportunity to spend it building alongside the teams here at Microsoft in service of our customers.

With deep gratitude, Yusuf.

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Earlier this week, I reported that Microsoft disrupted Excel’s user experience by introducing an un-dismissable floating Copilot button that obstructs data on the screen. "This is atrocious implementation," a user lamented. "I capture screenshots for validation, and this is inserting itself over the data, which already has limited space on my screen.

I reached out to Microsoft about the issue. While the company responded, it offered little beyond two resources: one explaining how to disable Copilot in Excel and Word, and another outlining its broader strategy of integrating Copilot into Office apps as part of an effort to "build an AI‑forward design system that supports work today, while carrying us into tomorrow."

And now, in a new report by Windows Latest, Microsoft has admitted that the floating Copilot button across its Office apps is getting in the way of users' workflows. Consequently, the company is now rolling out a fix that will allow users to move Copilot back to the ribbon.

"The placement of the Copilot button is the worst decision I've seen," a Windows Central reader complained. "I think I get the logic, of putting it in the lower right corner, where most chatbots and live chat buttons have been in web UI for decades, but Excel isn't a web app. There isn't a need for the button to be in the lower corner, covering usable working space. The toolbar is where everyone knows to go in Office, and it had a fitting home in the toolbar."

According to Microsoft:

"If intelligence doesn’t meet you at the right level of that cycle, it doesn’t feel like a partner. It feels like an interruption. That insight is the structural foundation of how Copilot behaves across Office apps. It sees what you’re working on and understands the context, allowing it to act within the given environment."

Microsoft has a big Copilot problem

But perhaps more interestingly, the tech giant indicated that it spotted higher Copilot interactions and engagement after it shipped the floating Copilot button as a default experience across its Office apps.

However, following backlash from users over the change, Microsoft is now rolling back the change and allowing users to move Copilot back to the ribbon. Windows Latest reports that Microsoft is expected to make this change in the last week of May 2026.

Elsewhere, Mat Velloso, a former Partner Director managing AI innovation in Windows at Microsoft, recently indicated that the company has already missed the AI wave, just like it did with the internet and mobile.

He argues that not even 3% of paying customers use Copilot, "even when the distribution is massive, and it's pre-deployed right in their faces," which lines up with a separate report suggesting that only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who interact with Copilot Chat actually pay for it, despite Microsoft spending $37.5 billion on its AI-themed efforts in Q2 FY26.

Interestingly, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated that the company now has more than 20 million enterprise customers paying for Microsoft Copilot, representing a 33% increase in the platform's user base from January's 15 million.

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Microsoft is preparing to break ground near St. Joe Farms, south of Granger, Indiana, in St. Joseph County, where it will construct a new data center to meet surging demand for computing power fueled by artificial intelligence. While construction of the data center was approved last year and has already been zoned for development, residents of St. Joseph County have openly voiced their reservations about the project.

In response, Microsoft recently hosted an open house to address community concerns and provide more transparency about the development. The project will span 900 acres of land between Bittersweet Road and Currant Road, with the Indiana Toll Road forming its northern boundary (via WSBT).

However, many residents attended the open house carrying placards, staging a protest against the construction of the data center in their community. "I'm very much against everything that involves them being made and involves their existence," said James Dewitt, one Mishawaka resident.

"Big Tech" corporations like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have poured massive investments into the generative AI landscape. Yet their efforts have run into a critical bottleneck: computing power, which is essential for training and scaling sophisticated models.

These companies are now channeling billions into building out advanced data centers to strengthen their cloud computing capacity to meet the demands of next-gen AI models. While the construction of these data centers may bring short-term job opportunities to the community, the long-term consequences appear far more concerning.

For context, I reported that Microsoft and Google's electricity consumption surpasses the power usage of over 100 countries in 2024. This means that the community within the data center's vicinity will have to spend more on their electricity bills, not forgetting the large amount of water required for cooling. You can also expect increased pollution, gentrification, and decreased access to water.

“I don't think there's going to be a financial benefit. I mean, AI takes jobs, and a good example is New Carlisle on Amazon,” lamented Todd Robertson, Mishawaka Resident. Robertson is voicing a critical concern riddling millions of professionals worldwide as AI becomes more prevalent and gains broad adoption.

WSBT took it upon itself to seek answers from Microsoft on major concerns and questions residents have about the data center, including how much water it would consume and how it would affect their utility bills:

As for its effects on the job market, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has predicted that AI would automate all white-collar jobs in the next 18 months, leaving professionals in the lurch. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates seemingly echoed similar sentiments, citing that AI will replace humans for most things.

However, the philanthropic billionaire was a tad optimistic that energy experts, biologists, and coders would survive the AI revolution. His premise was simple — coding is too complex to be fully automated, and human intervention remains critical.

Microsoft has a "Community-First" approach to address data center concerns

At the beginning of the year, Microsoft President Brad Smith highlighted the company's efforts to build "Community-First" AI infrastructure, which will address some of the issues raised by concerned residents about the construction of these facilities in their backyards.

Microsoft claimed that its infrastructure approach will compel the company to pay its way in a bid to ensure that it doesn't increase electricity prices for the community. It also plans to reduce its water use and promises to replenish more water than it uses. Additionally, it plans to create jobs for locals and strengthen the community by investing in local AI training and non-profits.

Elsewhere, Microsoft's $1 billion data center in Kenya has seemingly been put on hold after the government failed to commit to paying for the annual capacity ‌Microsoft had requested to run Azure in the region. President William Ruto indicated that the project's power requirements would need to "switch off half the country" to keep the facility running.

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Microsoft has undoubtedly doubled down on generative AI, especially after locking in a multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI in 2019. While co-founder Bill Gates was skeptical about the company's initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI, primarily because of its non-profit business structure, the company has since integrated AI across its tech stack.

I recently reported that Microsoft has generated approximately $30 billion from OpenAI between 2023 and 2025, but somehow burned through $100 billion in costs from infrastructure to hosting to get there. As such, it's unclear whether the company is making bank from its big bet on AI.

Last month, Mat Velloso, a former Partner Director managing AI innovation in Windows at Microsoft, hinted at the complete opposite when he indicated that "Microsoft missed the internet wave, the mobile wave, and now it missed the AI wave" (via Windows Latest).

For context, Velloso worked at Microsoft for over 12 years as Partner Director managing AI innovation in Windows, including 4 years as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's technical advisor. He then transitioned to Google, where he led AI developer products at Google DeepMind, including the Gemini API, before his recent stint at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs as the VP of Product for the Developer Platform.

This means that the executive has worked across three of the top companies in the AI arms race, placing him in a unique position to comment on the trajectory of AI. Velloso listed several reasons highlighting why Microsoft missed its opportunity in the AI wave, including:

• You make Bing your biggest bet with AI. Not a single percentage point of user share goes up from that investment
• You bet on Copilot with AI. Not even 3% of paying users use it, even when the distribution is massive, and it's pre-deployed right in their faces
• Then you hire the wrong people and assign them to jobs they are obviously not qualified to do. It gets worse.
• Your OEMs invest on NPUs to then find out that nobody cares because not a single valuable use case was built for those in Windows/Office.
• Your GitHub, which should be thriving in the age of AI, drops below 90% SLA.

The executive's post on X gained some traction and engagement, including from Microsoft's head of communications, Frank X. Shaw. "As you may know Mat, there are times when reality is enough of an answer, and given that you worked with some of these wildly impressively long-tenured people you could just maybe say congrats for a great run and not jam into a negative frame," Shaw said, while defending the exodus of executives from the industry giant.

Velloso defended his point of view by comparing Google and Microsoft's shares. According to the executive, Google's shares skyrocketed to approximately 230% while Microsoft's remained at 0% when he moved to Google in 2024.

During Microsoft's Q3 FY26 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella indicated that the company now has more than 20 million enterprise customers paying for Microsoft Copilot, representing a 33% increase in the platform's user base from January's 15 million.

However, Velloso claims not even 3% of paying customers use Copilot, "even when the distribution is massive, and it's pre-deployed right in their faces." This lines up with a separate report suggesting that only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who interact with Copilot Chat actually pay for it, despite Microsoft spending $37.5 billion on its AI-themed efforts in Q2 FY26.

Microsoft's AI strategy

At the beginning of the year, Microsoft promised to make Windows 11 better by improving the operating system's overall user sentiment. As part of its ongoing Windows K2 initiative to overhaul and rehabilitate the OS, Microsoft is reducing where Copilot and its integrations appear.

Simultaneously, the tech giant overhauled its Copilot management with ex-Snap Jacob Andreou now leading Copilot experiences, both consumer and commercial, as an executive vice president reporting to Nadella. This frees Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman from some of his duties, allowing him to focus on developing in-house frontier AI models while chasing down the coveted superintelligence benchmark.

Over the past few months, investors have raised concerns over Microsoft's exorbitant spending on AI, questioning its capability to establish a clear path to profitability. This is amid claims that the AI bubble is on the verge of bursting, prompting market analysts to predict that investor interest in AI might be waning and could eventually be channeled to other profitable ventures in the foreseeable future.

Interestingly, some investors claim that AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are developing agents that could replace established productivity suites such as Microsoft 365 as Microsoft focuses on AI. Microsoft plans to double down on its AI efforts by investing up to $146 billion in infrastructure in 2026.

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As generative AI becomes more prevalent worldwide, job security is increasingly becoming a threat to many professionals. Amid security and privacy concerns, organizations are regularly integrating AI into their workflows and automating repetitive and redundant tasks, allowing professionals to focus on what really matters (in theory).

We've already seen some professionals lose their jobs to AI, and it's likely to get worse as the technology advances. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told Financial Times that artificial intelligence is only 18 months away from fully automating white-collar jobs, leaving professionals without work (via Fortune).

Suleyman backed up his prediction with the exponential growth in computational power. According to the executive, as AI becomes more advanced, AI models will be able to code better than most humans.

As early as 2024, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang indicated that coding might be dead in the water as a career option for the next generation. He encouraged the youth to explore alternative career options in biology, education, manufacturing, or farming. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman shared the same sentiments, suggesting that:

"If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can't exactly predict where it is — it's possible that most developers are not coding."

Microsoft's co-founder, Bill Gates, previously shared insights into AI's impact on jobs, suggesting it'll replace humans for most things. However, the executive indicated the coders, biologists, and energy experts would weather the storm and survive the AI revolution.

The philanthropic billionaire indicated that generative AI lacks the creativity and judgment to replace human programmers, even in a century. Last year, Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei claimed that AI was on the verge of slashing up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs, making it harder for the next generation to get into the job market.

The future of generative AI in the workplace remains uncertain, especially as reports warn the bubble may be bursting, with investor interest fading amid unclear paths to profitability

AI should be poised to reshape how we work by automating repetitive tasks, freeing us to focus on what truly matters. That way, I see it as a powerful productivity tool rather than a replacement for professionals.

For big tech companies, the challenge lies in solving the complex puzzle of securing sufficient computing power, attracting top AI talent, and sustaining the funding needed to drive meaningful advances in the field.

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Updated 19/5/2026: This article has been updated to reflect a statement from Microsoft.I heard back from Microsoft about the issue flagged by Excel users about the unremovable floating Copilot button. The company shared two resources: one on how to disable Copilot in Excel and Word, and the other talked about architecting Copilot into Office apps as part of its broader strategy to "build an AI-forward design system that supports work today, while carrying us into tomorrow."

I had my head buried behind a Windows PC as early as the Microsoft Encarta days, but I’ve never quite managed to master Microsoft Excel. However, Microsoft's strategic partnership with OpenAI and the consequent integration of generative AI across its tech stack seemingly aimed to transform the user experience from an uphill climb to a walk in the park.

While Copilot in Excel might be viewed as a game-changer, allowing users to generate and explain formulas, summarize large datasets into charts, and more, Microsoft has seemingly resorted to disrupting the app's user experience with a floating Copilot button (via Neowin).

The change has received backlash from users because there's no way to hide the button from your user interface. However, you can right-click the floating Copilot button and select the Dock option, which will only slide the button to the side of the screen "with a caret-like behavior that launches the Copilot side panel and returns the floating button if you click on it," as the outlet describes the experience.

"The icon is visually disruptive and gets in the way for those that do NOT want to use Copilot - and lots of people don't," a user lamented. "And of course, speaking of which, even uninstalling it does not work, because it just gets reinstalled in the next update. What gives? Please stop trying to force people to use your apps when they do not want to. The only thing that it does is to make them look at alternatives. I know I certainly am."

The floating Copilot button does ship with useful capabilities, including options to either conduct research or create a table. Still, users have expressed reservations about the change and requested that Microsoft return it to its original position in the toolbar at the top or include an option to hide the floating button completely, while describing it as "visually disruptive."

According to a user in Excel's dedicated feedback hub: "Please get rid of the floating copilot icon at the bottom right of my Excel screen, or give me a way to turn it off. I do not want, nor need, Copilot in any capacity. Its presence is infuriating."

"This is atrocious implementation," another user added. "I capture screenshots for validation, and this is inserting itself over the data, which already has limited space on my screen. The button also blocks clicking the scroll bar at the point it overlaps (docked and undocked), at least on MacOS 26.4.1 (25E253)."

"Putting a button over the working content was not a good move by Microsoft. There needs to be a toggle or something to move it back to the ribbon (without requiring the admin to do it for our work 365 accounts). Or just undo this change, it was completely unnecessary."

In the past, Microsoft has been on the spot for forcibly integrating Copilot across its tech stack, specifically Windows 11. It's only recently that the company decided to scale back its aggressive AI push across its operating system by reducing where Copilot buttons and menus appear as part of its broader Windows "K2" initiative, which is designed to address pain points across the operating system and improve its overall user sentiment.

It'll be interesting to see whether Microsoft listens to feedback about adding an option to hide the floating Copilot button in Excel, and how fast it acts. While the integration can be useful, Microsoft should always give users control over Copilot, allowing them to surface it when they need it.

I've reached out to Microsoft for a comment about the issue and will update this article as more information becomes available.

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Last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the company writes up to 30% of its code using generative AI. As it now happens, Microsoft is reportedly planning to reduce the use of Anthropic's Claude Code — a move designed to push its employees toward GitHub Copilot CLI.

For context, The Verge's Tom Warren reported that Microsoft started opening access to Claude Code for its employees in December, including developers, project managers, and designers, allowing them to interact and experiment with the AI-coding assistant directly in their workflows.

Warren reports that Claude Code gained vast popularity among Microsoft employees over the past six months, which has seemingly led to a pullback on its Claude Code push in favor of its own GitHub Copilot CLI. "While Claude Code has been a popular addition, it has also undermined Microsoft’s new GitHub Copilot CLI coding tool," Warren explained.

According to Warren's sources, Microsoft’s Experiences + Devices division, which includes teams working on Windows, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, and Surface, is supposed to stop using Claude Code by the end of June. These teams are expected to transition their workflows to GitHub Copilot CLI over the next few weeks.

The report reveals that the decision isn't centered on Microsoft pushing its staffers towards its own offering — there are some financial implications at play, too. Microsoft's financial year is expected to end on June 30, which means canceling Claude Code licenses for its employees could cut its operational costs as it transitions into a new financial year.

While speaking to The Verge, Microsoft's VP of experiences and devices group, Rajesh Jha, indicated:

“When we began offering both Copilot CLI and Claude Code, our goal was to learn quickly, benchmark the tools in real engineering workflows, and understand what best supported our teams. Claude Code was an important part of that learning… at the same time, Copilot CLI has given us something especially important: a product we can help shape directly with GitHub for Microsoft’s repos, workflows, security expectations, and engineering needs.”

It'll be interesting to see how the transition from Claude Code to GitHub Copilot CLI is received, especially since the vast majority seems to favor the former. The company's initial plan was to have its engineers use both offerings concurrently, to compare their capabilities, and to provide feedback.

Interestingly, Microsoft staffers have seemingly preferred Claude Cove over GitHub Copilot over the past few months, primarily because of the feature disparity between the two products.

In the interim, I reported that Microsoft is actively looking into AI startup acquisitions to cement its position in the AI landscape, including Cursor AI. However, that deal might not see the light of day as it could trigger regulatory scrutiny for Microsoft. This is because GitHub Copilot and Cursor are curiously similar in the AI coding space.

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Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI traces back to the Windows Phone era, when CEO Satya Nadella was still using the device daily. A screenshot shared by The Verge’s Tom Warren shows emails between Sam Altman and Nadella dating to April 7, 2015 — suggesting the multibillion‑dollar alliance may have begun even earlier.

Nadella later admitted that pulling the plug on Windows Phone was a strategic mistake. But I digress... Microsoft is now doubling down on AI, integrating the technology across its products and services. This is primarily due to its partnership with OpenAI.

Investors have raised concerns about the company's fixation on AI, especially since it's particularly hard to establish a clear path to profitability. Market analysts predict that investor interest is waning after Microsoft lost approximately a quarter of its value in the first three months of 2026, perhaps the steepest quarterly drop ever since the 2008 financial crisis.

Yesterday, I reported that Microsoft has generated approximately $30 billion in revenue since it partnered with OpenAI. But as it now seems, this barely makes a dent in how much it has spent.

Microsoft corporate development lead Michael Wetter has now confirmed through testimony in the ongoing Musk v. Altman trial that it has spent more than $100 billion on its partnership with OpenAI, largely on infrastructure and hosting costs (via Bloomberg).

“We needed to build Azure infrastructure in advance of providing those services to OpenAI,” Wetter added. Microsoft incurred most of these costs before receiving any revenue from OpenAI.

This staggering figure underscores how central OpenAI has become to Microsoft’s AI strategy. In the same breath, it also shows how instrumental Microsoft's partnership has been to OpenAI's rapid growth.

It's worth noting that the $100 billion mentioned above includes Microsoft's $13 billion investment in OpenAI and is cumulative through the current fiscal year ending June.

While taking the stand on Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated that he was “very proud” that Microsoft took the risk to invest in OpenAI when “no one else was willing” to bet on the ever-evolving technology. Despite doubts from Microsoft co‑founder Bill Gates, who opposed Satya Nadella’s $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019 due to its non‑profit structure, the deal went forward.

Microsoft and OpenAI recently renewed their vows under a new non-exclusive partnership, meaning the tech giant will no longer need to pay OpenAI a revenue share. The new deal capped OpenAI's revenue-sharing payments at $38 billion through 2030, saving it approximately $97 billion when compared to the terms in the original agreement.

Microsoft is building an OpenAI-free future

In an exclusive report by Reuters, Microsoft is reportedly exploring AI startup acquisitions, potentially emancipating itself from an overreliance on OpenAI to power its tech stack.

The report suggests that acquisitions will help Microsoft assemble top AI talent, accelerating progress toward developing an in‑house model as early as next year. The company has already made significant strides, even reassigning AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman to focus on frontier models and the pursuit of superintelligence.

Microsoft reportedly considered acquiring Cursor this spring but backed out, fearing antitrust scrutiny since it already owns GitHub Copilot, another code‑generation tool.

The company is exploring a possible acquisition of Inception, a startup developing LLMs with a different approach, though insiders say the deal may never happen.

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In 2024, a report claimed that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is still intimately involved in the company's affairs despite stepping down from the board to focus on philanthropy. It further revealed that the executive's word is treated as the gospel and that he played a crucial role in fostering Microsoft and OpenAI's partnership.

Interestingly, a separate report revealed that Bill Gates was initially skeptical about Microsoft investing $1 billion in OpenAI, primarily because of its non-profit structure. "You're going to burn this billion dollars," warned Gates.

But as it now seems, Gates was wrong. A new report by The Information revealed that Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI has generated approximately $30 billion in revenue for the former between 2023 and 2025 based on the tech giant's corporate documents and internal material, which is more than twice its investment ($13 billion) in the AI firm.

For context, most of this revenue comes from OpenAI's infrastructure needs, with reports suggesting that the ChatGPT maker spent up to $23 billion between 2023 and 2025 to rent out Microsoft’s Azure servers. The rest of the revenue comes from AI-powered products and services, such as Office 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot.

That said, the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership has evolved significantly over the past year, first signing a new definitive agreement in October 2025 that will allow OpenAI to sever its ties with Microsoft only after an independent body verifies that the AI firm has indeed achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI).

As OpenAI evolved into a for-profit entity to secure more funding from investors, Microsoft now holds a 27% stake, translating to approximately $135 billion.

The partnership also recently turned non-exclusive. This means Microsoft will no longer need to pay OpenAI a revenue share. The new deal capped OpenAI's revenue-sharing payments at $38 billion through 2030, saving it approximately $97 billion when compared to the terms in the original agreement.

It's worth noting that tech giant remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner and its products will ship on Azure first. However, the ChatGPT maker can still provide all its products to customers across any cloud provider if it fails or chooses not to support the necessary capabilities.

Microsoft's partnership seems fractured

It's no secret that there's been a bit of tension between Microsoft and OpenAI. Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, citing that the company defrauded him out of millions of dollars by using a fake humanitarian mission with Microsoft's help, doesn't make things better.

Microsoft has been taking elaborate measures, seemingly emancipating itself from an over-reliance on OpenAI for its technologies, including developing its own in-house frontier AI models.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff predicted that Microsoft would not use OpenAI in the future, shortly after the company announced its now-cancelled $500 billion Stargate project, which was designed to construct data centers across the United States to meet its computing power needs.

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