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AI IS MY COPILOT

It’s all about AI agents at Microsoft Build

Microsoft announced new “agentic AI” tools for coding, science, and data at its Build 2025 developer conference.

5/19/25 3:41PM

Microsoft announced a bevy of new AI tools at its Build 2025 developer conference in Seattle. The big theme: AI agents are here.

CEO Satya Nadella took the stage for a two-hour presentation outlining the company’s plans for developers. Nadella’s presentation included cameos from some key AI leaders: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Tesla/X/xAI CEO Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang.

Microsoft’s $14 billion partnership with OpenAI was recently reported to be fraying due to tension between Nadella and Altman, but the OpenAI CEO was the very first guest for a live interview, which was a completely cordial talk. Altman discussed OpenAI’s new Codex coding agent and how agents are the future of coding.

Nadella also highlighted updates to Copilot — but that requires some unpacking.

There’s Microsoft Copilot 365, which is an AI agent that lurks in your productivity suite of apps and can help generate PowerPoint slides, summarize Microsoft Teams meetings, or analyze your data.

There are also big updates to Github Copilot, an AI tool that helps software developers generate, test, and debug code, which has evolved from an in-editor AI tool to an “asynchronous coding agent.”

That’s not to be confused with plain old Microsoft Copilot, which is just a ChatGPT-style chatbot.

Also there’s Microsoft Copilot Studio, for building new AI agents, and Copilot Tuning, for fine-tuning your AI agents on your company’s proprietary data. (It seems Microsoft didn’t get our memo on the growing AI naming branding confusion.)

Microsoft’s Azure AI cloud computing platform is adding xAI’s Grok3 models. In a prerecorded interview, Musk waxed nostalgic about his early days working with Windows and how the goal with Grok is “to aspire to truth with minimal error.”

Nadella highlighted that Azure AI Foundry lets developers use models from OpenAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Meta’s “full heard of llama” models.

Microsoft is now embracing Model Context Protocol into its tools, an open standard developed by Anthropic to standardize the way apps interact with different AI models.

Microsoft also announced a new tool to let companies quickly add conversational chatbots to their websites called NLWeb that can pull from a company’s own data.

For the scientific community, the company announced Microsoft Discovery, an AI-powered research platform that is built to help scientists research, develop hypotheses, and test new discoveries.

At one point during Nadella’s presentation, two protestors disrupted the keynote, challenging the company’s cloud computing contracts with the Israeli government. One protestor turned out to be a Microsoft employee who was able to email several thousand coworkers about the protest after being ejected from the theater.

The most outlandish tech CEO quotes from 2025

Tech CEOs have been nuttier than ever.

Rani Molla6h

Rani Molla7h

Trump AI executive order is a “major win” for Open AI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, says Ives

President Trump’s new executive order aiming to keep states from enacting AI laws that inhibit US “global AI dominance” is a “major win” for OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. Big Tech companies have collectively plowed hundreds of billions into the technology, while seeing massive stock price gains, and Ives believes they stand to gain much more.

“Given that there have been over 1,000 AI laws proposed at the state level, this was a necessary move by the Trump Administration to keep the US out in front for the AI Revolution over China,” Ives wrote, adding that state-by-state regulation “would have crushed US AI startup culture.” The presidential order would withhold federal funds from states that put in place onerous AI regulations.

This morning, Whitehouse AI adviser Sriram Krishnan said in a CNBC interview that he’d be working with Congress on a single national framework for AI.

Despite Ives’ rosy read-through on the order, with the exception of Nvidia, which jumped on a report of boosted Chinese demand, many AI stocks are in the red early today. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF is down nearly 1% premarket, as the AI trade struggles thanks to underwhelming earnings results from Oracle earlier this week.

Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence

This morning, Whitehouse AI adviser Sriram Krishnan said in a CNBC interview that he’d be working with Congress on a single national framework for AI.

Rani Molla12/11/25

Epic scores two victories as “Fortnite” returns to Google Play and appeals court keeps injunction against Apple

“Fortnite” maker Epic Games notched two wins Thursday in its drawn-out battle against Big Tech’s app stores. “Fortnite” returned to the Google Play app store in the US, Reuters reports, as Epic continues working with Google to secure court approval for their settlement.

Meanwhile, a US appeals court partly reversed sanctions against Apple in Epic’s antitrust case, calling parts of the order overly broad, but upheld the contempt finding and left a sweeping injunction in place — keeping pressure on Apple to allow developers to steer users to outside payment options and reduce its tight control over how apps can communicate and monetize on iOS.

So many reasons to drop in this month... and now we're on Google Play in the U.S. too!

Android: https://t.co/Z6pkYqYsRI
iPhone: https://t.co/JNpTVneGMN
PC: https://t.co/CPsjp3XNdo pic.twitter.com/TV9b1ZlqfJ
— Fortnite (@Fortnite) December 11, 2025

Jon Keegan12/11/25

Report: AI-powered toys tell kids where to find matches, parrot Chinese government propaganda

You may want to think twice before buying your kids a fancy AI-powered plush toy.

A new report from NBC News found that several AI-powered kids toys could easily be steered to dangerous as well as sexually explicit conversations in a shocking demonstration of the loose safety guardrails in this novel category of consumer electronics.

A report out by the Public Interest Research Group details what researchers found when they tested five AI-powered toys for kids bought from Amazon. Some of the toys offered instructions on where to find matches and how to start fires.

NBC News also bought some of these toys and found they parroted Chinese government propaganda and gave instructions for how to sharpen knives. Some of the toys also discussed inappropriate topics for kids, like sexual kinks.

The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).

AI toys for kids talk about sex and issue Chinese Communist Party talking points, tests show

The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).

Jon Keegan12/11/25

OpenAI releases GPT-5.2, the “best model yet for real-world, professional use”

After feeling the heat from Google’s recent launch of its powerful Gemini 3 model, OpenAI’s response to its “code red” has been released, reportedly on an accelerated schedule to keep up with the competition.

The company’s new flagship model, GPT-5.2, is out, and the company is calling it “the most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it the “smartest generally-available model in the world” and shared benchmarks that showed it achieving higher scores than Gemini 3 Pro and Anthopic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in some software engineering tests and abstract reasoning, math, and science problems.

In a press release announcing the new model, the company said: “Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.”