Good morning. Just a reminder that our Fortune Brainstorm AI is comin’ up quick—it’s December 7 to 8 at the St Regis San Francisco.
World Labs’ Fei-Fei Li is coming. Box CEO Aaron Levie and Recursive CEO Richard Socher are, too. And did I mention Trae Stephens of Founders Fund and Pedro Franceschi of Brex? In the words of the late Hulk Hogan: Hell yeah, brother.
Register your interest here. As I’ve said before, we always reach capacity. Do not wait.
Today’s tech news follows. —Andrew Nusca
P.S. We’ve published the latest Europe edition of our Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For list. The highest-ranking tech company comes in at No. 4. Who might that be? Two hints—it’s headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area and it was founded in 1984. (Paging Orwell!) Find out here.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Hot tip? Drop me a line.
THE BIG STORY
Microsoft shows off new Windows software, revamped for agentic AI
Microsoft’s Windows operating system, the long-standing flagship of the company’s software empire, is getting a revamp for the AI age.
The company unveiled a variety of updates to Windows on Wednesday, including incorporating AI agents and other AI tools directly into the PC software, as Microsoft seeks to ensure that its products remain at the center of a rapidly changing tech industry.
Speaking at San Francisco’s Dogpatch Studios, Chief Executive Satya Nadella said Windows is becoming a “hybrid intelligence” system, meaning there will be capabilities for cloud-based AI, as well as AI that runs locally through products like the coding tool GitHub.
“Just having the [AI] model doesn’t do much for anything,” Nadella said, explaining that Microsoft is bringing together local AI, AI-powered software, and devices built natively for AI, such as the new Surface Laptop Ultra that the company unveiled at the event. “Some of the things you’ve been using all click together.”
A big part of Microsoft’s plans involves integrating the reimagined Copilot AI app seamlessly into Windows. This means having Copilot run tasks without having to access the cloud when those tasks don’t need heavy compute, according to Jacob Andreou, the head of Copilot.
A user, for example, will be able to have Copilot autonomously pull all of the files they need to file taxes from various parts of their laptop and do so without accessing the cloud, making it cheaper and faster.
“Copilot now truly understands your PC,” he said. “It’s Copilot built natively for Windows.”
Microsoft is also tying its updates to its new Surface Laptop Ultra, a high-end device built for developers and creators. A user on the Ultra, the company showed, can play video games while editing a video and running AI workloads.
The new Surface Laptop Ultra uses Nvidia’s RTX Spark “superchip” and will cost $2,599. It will be available beginning October 16. —Sebastian Herrera
THE BLIND BOX
“It’s important that society reaffirms support for human mathematical expertise."
THE RUNDOWN
—Anthropic debuts Claude Haiku 5.5, “the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model we’ve ever released.”
—SpaceX reportedly wants to raise $40 billion to purchase Nvidia chips.
—OpenAI adds GPT-6 to ChatGPT with a twist: a new “intelligent” interface that changes based on your prompts.
—Google launches Playground, a no-code web platform for using AI to make games.
—Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs back Biohub to build foundational data for AI models to predict and treat disease.
—Controversy: Four Native American tribes partner with Kalshi to launch prediction apps.
—Amazon’s Ring rolls out its first smart lock, which has a nifty feature to deal with its batteries going dead.
—ChatGPT still does kids’ homework for them, a children’s advocacy organization says.
THE PARTING SHOT
The thing about all this Altman-Amodei AI slop is, if the two AI CEOs ever really got together and had a great time, would we ever know the difference?