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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 4:41PM

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.

Rani Molla

Meta posts an earnings and revenue beat — and a huge capex bill

The social media giant reported earnings after the bell Wednesday.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg visits U.S. Capitol for Senate meetings

Rani Molla, Nate Becker

Alphabet jumps as Q1 earnings and revenue blow past expectations

The search giant also boosted its capex forecast for the year and said it expects 2027 capex to be “significantly” higher than 2026.

Rani Molla12h

SpaceX filings reportedly show no one can fire Elon Musk except Elon Musk

The only thing stopping Elon Musk from being chairman and CEO of SpaceX is Elon Musk, according to Reuters, which viewed an excerpt of the company’s IPO filing.

The document outlines a dual-class share structure giving Musk control via super-voting stock. The filing says he “can only be removed from our board or these positions by the vote of Class B holders” — shares he’ll control after the listing. It adds that if he keeps those shares, he could “continue to control the election and removal of a majority of our board.”

At a typical public company — even founder-led ones with dual-class structures — a CEO can be fired by the board of directors, which represents shareholders and can vote to remove them over issues such as corporate performance, strategy, or misconduct.

The unusual SpaceX setup means Musk is unlikely to face the kind of CEO succession pressure he’s dealt with at Tesla. Musk, of course, is not a typical CEO, and the value of his companies has long been closely tied to his presence.

To be sure, SpaceX’s confidential IPO filing isn’t in its final form yet — while the filing is still in the confidential phase, the company will be going back and forth with the SEC, which will review it and suggest or require changes.

Exclusive: Only Elon Musk can fire Elon Musk from SpaceX, filing shows

Rani Molla4/28/26

OpenAI’s models are officially coming to Amazon

Amazon is finally getting in on the hottest ticket in tech.

After Microsoft announced yesterday that it has agreed to give up its exclusive rights to sell OpenAI’s models, Amazon, as expected, will start offering them to customers — something Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman says users have been asking for “for a really long time.” Some models are available now in preview, and the most powerful GPT versions will show up “in the coming weeks.”

This is a big shift in the AI cloud wars. Microsoft’s early bet on OpenAI gave Azure an edge by locking up the most in-demand models. Now that exclusivity is gone, Amazon and other competitors can finally offer them too, closing a key gap and competing more directly for AI customers.

Amazon Set to Sell OpenAI Tech After Microsoft Cedes Exclusivity

Claire Yubin Oh4/28/26

Ship-tracking app surges as Iran war continues

As Middle East peace talks stretch on, with Tehran reportedly offering to reopen the Strait of Hormuz if the US lifts its blockade and the war ends, the owner of shipping intelligence platform MarineTraffic revealed that the app has gained millions of new users since the conflict began.

MarineTraffic’s user count jumped to 8.5 million this April, up from 3.5 million a year ago, the cofounder of its parent company, Kpler, said in an interview with the Financial Times. Paid subscribers, often workers within companies and governments looking for more data on supply chains and commodities trading, rose 11,000 in the same period.

Kpler, which also owns shipping intelligence platform FleetMon, draws its data from a range of sources, including the Automatic Identification System, satellites, and more than 500 people on-site, like port terminal operators.

Per Appfigures data, MarineTraffic is estimated to have raked in almost $1 million across March and April in app revenue (through April 27), more than double the ~$346,500 from the same months last year. Across the full year, Kpler expects to earn between $300 million and $400 million in annual recurring revenues.