Weekend roundup: Copilot everywhere, Veo 3.1 and Altman on morality

Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC
The next revolution for Microsoft is putting the Copilot bot front and center in its operating system. Any Windows 11 PC will now be listening for the «Hey Copilot» prompt and you won’t be needing a Copilot Plus PC to engage with it. This will be across apps and settings and Windows 11 should simply «understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that.» The spooky part? They want Copilot to read your screen to interact with you.
More at: The Verge, Engadget and The Windows Blog.

Anthropic introduces «Skills»
The new feature across all of their apps is basically a memorized workflow, or folders of actions that Claude can use to remember how to do things. That means you can store a collection of prompts or actions within the app and have it used at a later stage, which can come in handy for tasks used often. It works across apps, so you can store instructions from Excel plotting to brand guidelines. And it’s scriptable, too, so you can save complete routines.
Read more: Anthropic’s launch page, writeup at The Verge.

Read on for more!

The Turing Test for video … 😅 https://t.co/HxI5PgrIYj

— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) October 16, 2025

Google’s Veo 3.1 is much more capable
275 million videos later, Google is rolling out a huge update to the Veo 3 generator. It now comes with better audio and «enhanced realism» — meaning it produces much clearer, lifelike videos. You can now upload multiple images as stopgaps and have Veo generate motion between them, you can also set the beginning and end of a scene from pictures. Also, you can «extend» videos to last a full minute «or more.» You can even add or remove objects from a video on the fly.
More at: Google’s blog, Engadget and The Verge.

Altman: We are not the morality police
After the whole internet got enticed by his remark on «erotica» for ChatGPT, Altman was a little stunned. The OpenAI CEO reiterated age-related content rules on x.com, simply saying there will be strict rules for teens, and less strict rules for adults. Just like the movies have R-ratings to set «appropriate boundaries,» Altman wants the same to apply content on ChatGPT, he says, and adds «we are not the elected moral police of the world.»
More at: Altman’s tweet, CNBC.

Google’s NotebookLM integrates with arXiv papers
For those of us who like to spend the early morning tracking through fresh research reports on the arXiv repository, NotebookLM just made the whole process a lot easier. It already performs well as a research assistant trawling through such reports, and with this integration, the resource pool just a lot bigger — 2.4 million articles richer. The idea is that you can find a report you want to study, have NotebookLM summarize it for you, give you a lecture and ask questions directly to the AI agent reading the report. And it’s easy; all you have to do is change the url of the paper you are reading to alphaxiv.org/rest-of-url, or simply turn to their AI front page to browse.
More at: Short tweet from alhaXiv, AI home page for alphaXiv.