The Archive

Retro gaming is going through a wild time at the moment, thanks to decompilations and recompilations that are letting gamers port classic titles to new devices, or merge code from two different games into a single new experience. Microsoft has witnessed skateboarding being modded into Call of Duty and Halo being played in a web browser, and the company is now officially embracing the chaos of this new AI-powered era of game modding. Microsoft is putting together a new Xbox Labs group to explore the rapid emergence of these mods, many of which use AI models to help modders remix games in ways ...

Microsoft’s and are now available on . Generate images from text or edit existing images with one AI Gateway API key, without a Microsoft account.MAI-Image-2.6MAI-Image-2.6-FlashAI Gateway Both models support photorealistic images, text rendering, and targeted edits to products, portraits, and layouts. Use up to five reference images to guide edits or combine subjects, with output sizes up to 1536 × 1536 pixels. To generate an image, use either model ID with a text prompt: To edit an image, provide a reference image and describe what to change: Try or in the playground, or read the . MAI-Imag...

Microsoft President Brad Smith calls for urgent AI regulation, saying milk and washing machines have more oversight than AI companies.

Microsoft’s Maia 300 chip. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is announcing its third-generation Maia in-house AI chip today, designed to be the "primary AI inference system" for Microsoft's products and services. Maia 300 not only improves the cost and efficiency of running AI workloads in the cloud, it's also more capable of handling the latest reasoning models and agentic tasks. Maia 300 will start being rolled out to production in 2027, and it has been designed with efficiency in mind. "We expect Maia 300 to deliver 40 percent more tokens per megawatt compared to leading GPU-based systems," say...

In a lengthy post on X, Microsoft's CEO laid out his views on the dangers posed by highly advanced AI models and how to confront those risks. Nadella says we can no longer accept a world where AI is treated as a "set of nested black boxes" whose advice and actions we simply accept or reject. He calls for building a more transparent system where models can be contained, observed, and leaves behind "tamper-proof human readable evidence." Many of his recommendations align with what we've heard from others in the industry: timely incident disclosure, independent audits, verifiable data, and conta...

In a Saturday morning post, Microsoft's CEO wrote that it’s time “to step back and assess the trust architecture” of AI.

Amazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move from Microsoft earlier this year. Secrecy has fueled community backlash against AI infrastructure, with opposition leading to hundreds of proposed and enacted moratoriums from New York to San Francisco. Meanwhile, a wave of startups is betting that consumers will hand AI agents access […]

is now available on . It answers typed questions about text with probabilities, choices, and scores. It can be used to classify support requests, select the next step in a workflow, or assess an AI response against a rubric.Decision-1 from MicrosoftAI Gateway The model can answer yes/no questions, choose among named categories, or score an input against an ordered set of criteria. Multiple questions can share the same input in one request. Choice and score answers include probabilities for each option, so your application can decide when to act or send an uncertain result for review. Call Dec...

Google is launching a "universal" Gemini AI agent that can work across apps and devices in the background. The tool, announced as part of the Gemini at Work event on Thursday, will be available within the Gemini Enterprise app, allowing users to chat with the Gemini agent and assign it tasks from a single interface. In addition to having Gemini work directly inside Workspace apps like Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and others, users can interact with the agent from their mobile device, desktop computer, the web, and third-party apps like Slack or Microsoft 365. Since it runs in the clo...

Get ready for more AI in your Windows and more AI on the desktop.

Microsoft revealed the specs and price for its Surface Laptop Ultra, AI PCs that run on Nvidia chips that are designed to run AI models and agents.

Microsoft just wrapped up a big Windows and Surface-focused keynote in San Francisco. The biggest announcement was arguably the release details about the Surface Laptop Ultra, its new laptop that’s powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark Arm-based chip. The machine will start at $2,599 for a configuration with an 8-core CPU, 24GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage, and it will be released on October 16th. The laptop also has built-in magnetic USB-C charging instead of the proprietary Surface Connect magnetic charging port. The Verge‘s Tom Warren published a deep dive all about the new laptop. Microsoft also ...

At today's Windows and Surface event, Microsoft showed off an upgrade to its Copilot AI system that will give it access to local files on your PC and the ability to take actions across the OS. It's part of an idea Microsoft is calling "Hybrid Intelligence," where apps and tools rely on a mix of local and cloud AI models to accomplish tasks efficiently. To show off how Hybrid Intelligence works, Jacob Andreou, Microsoft's EVP of Copilot, walked through a video demo on stage asking Microsoft's Autopilot tool to help with filing taxes. Andreou told the AI agent that he got an email from his acco...

Microsoft's Nvidia-powered Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is available for preorder now directly, and slated to ship in November for just about $6,000. It's pricier than the DGX Spark mini PC Nvidia launched last year, but PC prices have been climbing due to shortages of RAM and other components. The Dev Box's flat, 3D-printed anodized aluminum chassis doubles as a heatsink and resembles the top vents on an Xbox Series X. It's launching alongside the new Surface Laptop Ultra and runs on Nvidia's Arm-based RTX Spark platform and 128GB of unified memory. With that much memory, along with a 100-watt ...

OpenAI's newly announced suite of office features puts it into mor direct competition with more traditional software companies.

When an engineer or team creates useful agentic artifacts for their daily work (e.g., instructions, skills, and MCP configurations), others naturally want to adopt them when they see how those artifacts could help with their own work. Sharing the files is straightforward, but keeping those consumers supplied with fixes, updated guidance, and compatible tool configurations […] The post Enabling Consistent AI-Assisted Engineering with GitHub Copilot Plugins appeared first on Microsoft for Developers.

“Microsoft claims to want to be a good neighbor, but the jury is still out."

Microsoft's new Surface laptops forego Copilot+ PC branding.

After teasing its new Copilot "super app" last month, Microsoft is officially unveiling it today. The redesigned Copilot app bundles three AI capabilities into a single interface of chat, coding, and agents. As part of the launch, Microsoft is also rebranding Scout, the AI personal assistant it unveiled at Build earlier this year, as Autopilot. This new Copilot app will have three tabs for Home, Code, and Autopilot, with Home combining Copilot Chat and Cowork together. It's the default landing experience for Copilot users, and Microsoft is also planning to include a Today feature inside it th...

Ema has raised $140 million to date and has more than 50 enterprise customers, including Google and Microsoft.

EvilTokens provided an end-to-end platform that makes mass compromises faster and easier.

The British AI data center developer depends on tech giants Microsoft and Anthropic for most of its revenue.

Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times' case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies' own documentation warned that it was starting a "doom loop" that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the "largest theft of labor in human history," and that it made a "complete mockery of the idea of fair use." Many of the most eye-catching quotes from the document come from Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. Though, the company has tried to distance itself from Hecht's assertions. Microsoft spokesperson Al...

Microsoft, OpenAI emails reveal fear of AI “doom loop” killing news orgs.

Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI's data practices "theft" while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.

Remember when tech leaders would tell their employees to “move fast and break things”? It seemed that would be the way of AI too. But after a summer where rogue AI agents became reality, and researchers warned that AI could kill us all, a number of leading US AI companies are publicly suggesting it’s time to pump the brakes and “pace the frontier” of bleeding-edge AI development. Their motivations are suspect, but leaders at major AI companies — including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and X — are at least paying lip service to the idea of a superintelligence slowdown. Will these AI co...

Today, I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. As you’re no doubt aware, the biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation. It should come as no surprise that Mustafa has strong opinions on how AI should be built and regulated. Microsoft just published a 37-page statement called the “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” which lays out the company’s principles around AI development and even its philosophy around really thorny issues like AI consciousness. If you’ll recall from his last appearance on the show, Mustafa thinks companies like A...

Over the past few days, a lot of people who stand to make a lot of money from AI all publicly agreed that it's time to make everyone slow down before we lose control - including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and X CEO Elon Musk. When people who profit from something declare that it's dangerous and needs to be regulated, there's always reason to be skeptical. But whatever their reason, this is far from the first time AI thought leaders have sounded the alarm. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution prompte...

The code of conduct lays out general principles that Microsoft AI models should uphold — supporting humans rather than replacing them, for instance, and accelerating human flourishing — as well as specific safety constraints meant to implement those principles.

Microsoft is publishing a 37-page "humanist AI code of conduct" today, amid growing safety concerns over AI model progress. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a coordinated slow down of AI development over the weekend, after researchers warned recently that AI model progress could outpace our ability to safely deploy increasingly complex systems and verify and control the actions of AI agents. Microsoft's AI code of conduct makes it clear that "people matter more than AI," and that AI models are not conscious and "should not be designed to imitate consciousness." Microsoft also rejects "th...