Github is coming for your code, after a successful trial on internal Microsoft data. (Picture: Github)If you ever used Github to complete your code, your data can now be «used to train and improve our AI models,» Github says.
This comes after a trial period where Copilot has been feeding on internal Microsoft engineers’ data, which they say «improved model performance.»
They will not train on your entire code repositories, and will only use your interactions with Copilot — including accepted outputs, inputs sent to the model and «code context.»
Github is hardly alone in doing this, as Anthropic and OpenAI have been doing this for more than half a year. It’s common industry practice.
The Senate officially clears the big three chatbots for staffer use. (Picture: generated)After some staffers had been using chatbots informally at work since at least 2025, the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms office of the Chief Information Officer has now approved three of them officially.
The chatbots cleared for «drafting and editing documents, summarizing information, preparing talking points and briefing material, and conducting research and analysis» are ChatGPT Enterprise, Gemini on Workspace and Copilot, according to Business Insider.
The Sergeant at Arms will now provide all Senate employees with an AI chatbot license at no cost. The office also touts Copilot Chat as integrated with Office 365 and is usable with Word and Excel — although Claude also offers this capability.
Microsoft’s version of Copilot is entirely cloud based, pleasing many enterprise customers. (Picture: Microsoft)While announcing Claude availability in «mainline Copilot chats,» Microsoft is also launching its version of the Cowork agent.
Copilot Cowork works mainly across Microsoft’s own Office 365-offerings, and can author emails in Outlook, manage calendars and create files in PowerPoint, Word and Excel, Microsoft says.
— When you hand off a task to Cowork, it turns your request into a plan. The plan continues in the background, with clear checkpoints so you can confirm progress, make changes, or pause execution at any time, they write.
It works locally on your computer to complete tasks, but Microsoft’s version is cloud-based, and works the data companies have uploaded, offering more diversity and control of their data.
Clippy much? Microsoft launches visualization of Copilot
If you ever use voice mode in Copilot, which Microsoft hopes to expand, you might see a new, expressive animation on your screen. That would be the newly announced «Mico.» Unlike the much maligned Clippy, Mico will use facial expressions that change as you talk. It’s only available in the US, and will work with an upcoming memory feature for Copilot to better respond to requests. More at:Microsoft’s launch, The Verge and Ars Technica.
OpenAI announces ChatGPT Business
ChatGPT will now combine all the context of your businesses’ connected apps, like Slack, Sharepoint, Github and Google Drive. This makes it possible to ask pretty detailed questions about your business and have comprehensive answers delivered in one place — without the need to go searching through lots of different repositories. The feature is available tor Business, Enterprise and Education customers starting last Thursday. More at: OpenAI’s launch page, The Verge and The Register.
Microsoft wants Copilot to listen for your prompt and interact with your screen, coming soon to Windows 11. (Picture: Microsoft)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.
Both OpenAI and Microsoft are out with speech-to-speech models this week. (Picture: OpenAI)OpenAI makes Realtime API generally available
The agentic Realtime model is a native speech-to-speech model that can be used to make customer service agents, phone reps and voice navigation features. It doesn’t go through speech-to-text and text-to-speech loops and generates audio «directly through a single model and API.» OpenAI is marketing this to developers who want more natural flowing speech, and it’s not available as distinct model in ChatGPT – yet. You can hear it and see it in use at places like Zillow, T-mobile, StubHub and Oscar Health, though. With general availability, it will surely show up in a lot more places soon. More at: OpenAI’s launch page, discussion on r/OpenAI.
Microsoft produces a big, scary list. (Picture: Adobe)The company behind the Copilot chatbot has compared the tasks most frequently performed by AI to actual jobs doing the work.
The result might not be all that surprising, as AI is used the most to solve issues in translation, communication and writing — and is least used in areas such as construction and other manual labor.
Data is from 2024
From studying some 200,000 anonymized copilot sessions in the USA during 2024, Microsoft has been able to produce a list of the 40 most vulnerable jobs — and the 40 least affected ones.
Edge’s new Copilot Mode doesn’t do much just yet, and isn’t agentic.It’s still a little rough around the edges, is not agentic and can’t support doing tasks.
The idea of turning on Copilot Mode is to get it involved in your tabs and research, to distill info from web pages and do basic tasks.
ChatGPT usage is way up in K-12 schools, and now teachers are getting a leg up in how to use it better. (Picture: Wesley Fryer, CC BY 2.0)With help and funding from Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, the American Federation of Teachers hopes to educate 400 000 teachers across the USA in ethical AI use in classrooms.
The program will begin right away with virtual, online training for all 1.8 million members of the union, and in New York City with a «three-day training session, including six hours of AI-focused material that highlighted practical, hands-on ways to marry the emerging technology with established pedagogy.»
Already used by a fourth of students According to the latest data, from February 2025, 79% of teens said they had heard about ChatGPT, while 26% admitted to using it in schoolwork — and there are a plethora of other tools available.
This piece of 1977 hardware hardly broke a sweat beating Copilot in chess. (Picture: Wikipedia) TikTok gets a taste of racist Veo 3-generations
Racist and dehumanizing Veo 3 videos aimed at blacks and immigrants are raking in millions of views on TikTok, MediaMatters reports.
The videos depict black people as monkeys with warrants, decries missing parents and calls them «the usual suspects.» Some of these 8-second videos, complete with watermarks, had 3 to 4 million views at the time they were discovered. — We proactively enforce robust rules against hateful speech and behavior and have removed the accounts we identified in the report, many of which were already banned prior to the report publishing, says TikTok in a statement to Mashable.
For higher engagement, Meta’s chatbots will reach out first
Users of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram could soon receive unprompted messages to ask about recent conversations, according to leaked documents seen by Business Insider. This is intended for bots made in Meta’s AI Studio, which lets users create custom chatbots. These will remember past chats and preferences, and will «follow up with you to share ideas or ask additional questions,» says a Meta spokesman.
Microsoft’s Copilot also sucks at chess
After first brimming with confidence and promising a «strong fight,» claiming to think 10-15 moves ahead, «remember previous moves and maintain continuity in gameplay» and that «our match should be much smoother» against the Atari 2600 chess simulator from 1977, Copilot went the way of ChatGPT by failing miserably in their game. By the seventh turn, it had lost two pawns, a knight and a bishop, while the Atari had only lost a single pawn. It went south from there, as reported by The Register.
Usage of AI will become part of permanence reviews at this Microsoft division. (Picture: Ryan Vaarsi, CC BY 2.0)The developer tools division head at Microsoft, Julia Liuson, recently sent out a memo to managers bluntly saying that «Using AI is no longer optional.»
— AI is now a fundamental part of how we work, she wrote. — Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level.
Employee evaluations should now include their use of AI tools, she says, and managers are rushing to find a formal metric to measure it.
Internal performance requirements at Microsoft vary from team to team, and this is just one division. But it shows how quickly companies are adopting the technology.
Across all of Microsoft, it is estimated that 30% of all coding is already done by AI.
Microsoft says AI will upend the workplace, and it will happen sooner than you think. (Picture: Joe McKendry/Microsoft)People are overworked and under pressure to produce ever more, Microsoft’s new «2025 Work Trend Index» report finds.
Enter AI agents to alleviate the press, they say, and 79 % of leaders concur. Most are now planning to use AI to boost productivity within the next 12 to 18 months.
Miss Quake II? Now you can play new levels generated by AI. (Picture: Screenshot)Amid Ai fears in the gaming industry, replete with layoffs and questions about artistry in the age of AI, Microsofts Copilot labs has offered a glimpse into what the future of gaming might look like.
They spent only just over a week on training to produce a real time game model of Quake II, says Tom’s Hardware, that now plays a somewhat choppy 10 frames per second or so version of the game — with new, never before seen gameplay, generated on the fly.
