Archive
Tag: Microsoft
OpenClaw Won. Big Tech Is Now Playing Its Game.
The definition of an AI agent has evolved rapidly since the term first entered the zeitgeist. The earliest versions were chatbots with better manners: systems that answered questions, drafted text, and waited for the next prompt. Tool use and function calling took them a step further, allowing models to query databases or call APIs, but […]
Web IQ Is Microsoft Rebuilding Search Around the Machines
Search engines learned what a good result looked like by observing how people behaved. A click followed by a long page stay signaled satisfaction, while a quick bounce back to the search results signaled a miss. Microsoft built its Bing search engine on those patterns. But in the AI era, there’s a type of user […]
Microsoft Debuts MAI-Thinking-1, Its First In-House Reasoning Model
For most of the generative AI era, Microsoft has been the most prominent buyer of someone else’s intelligence. Its Copilot stack runs on OpenAI’s GPT models. Azure customers reach for frontier reasoning through the partnership. The arrangement has worked, and it has also been a structural dependency that the company has spent the last year […]
Don’t Believe the Hype: AI Capabilities May Not Create Real-World Value
Kevin Scott always has something to say on the eve of Microsoft Build. The company’s chief technology officer shares his read on where technology is headed, typically in step with whatever the company is about to announce. This year, I joined executives, developers, and my fellow journalists in a downtown San Francisco bar as Scott […]
Microsoft: Meet the Frontier Professional, the Rarest AI Worker in Your Organization
Every company wants to become AI-native, and the pressure is real. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index finds that 65 percent of AI users fear falling behind if they don’t adapt quickly. But knowing you need to transform and knowing how to do it are two entirely different problems. One of the most practical places to […]
OpenAI’s Chronicle Looks a Lot Like Microsoft’s Recall. Will It Face the Same Scrutiny?
OpenAI wants to give its Codex coding agent a better memory. On Tuesday, the company rolled out an “experiment” feature called Chronicle that runs background agents to capture your screen, extract context from those images, and build persistent memories so Codex understands what you’re working on without you having to re-explain it every session. OpenAI says […]
Microsoft Has a Faster, Cheaper Version of Its Best Image Model
Microsoft isn’t slowing down in its push to develop its own lineup of homegrown AI models. On Tuesday, the company announced a variation of its text-to-image model called MAI-Image-2-Efficient. While both provide photorealistic and expressive images with reliable in-image text, the new model is designed to be 22 percent faster and four times more efficient. […]
Why Microsoft Is Betting on OpenClaw
IN THIS ISSUE: Microsoft is making its boldest agentic bet yet, building a new team to bring the OpenClaw framework into Microsoft 365 Copilot — a move that could reshape how hundreds of millions of office workers interact with AI. But as enterprises race to deploy AI agents, a quieter crisis is building in the […]
Microsoft Debuts MAI-Transcribe-1 Speech-to-Text Model That Tops Whisper, GPT, Gemini Flash
Microsoft’s AI division has been notably active in building out its first-party portfolio. It has developed everything from foundation models and vision capabilities to speech and image generation and diagnostic orchestration. Now, the company is adding another piece: MAI-Transcribe-1, a multilingual speech-to-text model that’s now available in public preview on Microsoft Foundry. MAI-Transcribe-1 is trained […]
Microsoft Expands Copilot Cowork to Frontier Program, Upgrades Researcher With Multi-Model Intelligence
Microsoft is opening Copilot Cowork to a broader set of enterprise customers through its Frontier program, the company announced today—the latest step in its bet that AI should stop answering questions and start finishing work. Powered by Anthropic’s Claude, Copilot Cowork lets users delegate complex tasks to an AI agent that plans and executes work […]