Skype was Microsoftâs biggest-ever acquisition in 2011, a deal brokered by former CEO Steve Ballmer when the company was trying to compete with the rise of the iPhone. But after spending $8.5 billion on Skype, Microsoft dropped the ball again and again over the past 14 years, to the point where Skype was so irrelevant during a global pandemic that everyone used Zoom instead.
Skype has been relegated to a forgotten relic of an era before Google and Appleâs mobile dominance, and Microsoft is now laying it to rest alongside other failed mobile efforts like Windows Phone. It wasnât always this way, though.
In early 2012, a few months after Microsoftâs acquisition, I visited the Skype offices in Stockholm that engineers had just moved into. Skype had just passed 41 million concurrent users, more than even Steamâs recent record. Skype was so popular at the time that people kept stealing the Skype signs outside its offices, so the company simply stopped replacing them.
Inside the Skype Stockholm office, I met engineers who were excited and nervous about Microsoftâs acquisition, but who had been reassured by a visit from Ballmer, who shook their hands and promised that Micr …
Nvidia’s dominance over the latest generation of graphics cards ends today. AMD might have surrendered the high end of the GPU market, but its new $549 Radeon RX 9070 and $599 RX 9070 XT look set to bring Nvidia back to reality, at least in the midrange.
After a disappointing $549 RTX 5070, a $749 RTX 5070 Ti thatâs near impossible to buy for anything less than $899, and a $1,999 RTX 5090 whose only competition is other Nvidia cards, AMDâs next-gen GPUs look perfectly timed and deliver on performance and price.
The RX 9070 is around 17 percent faster than Nvidiaâs RTX 5070 in 4K without upscaling enabled, cruising past Nvidiaâs card for the same price. The RX 9070 XT is as fast as the RTX 5070 Ti for $150 less.
Pricing is key with these cards, particularly as only 10 percent of GPU sales right now are from AMD. The company needs a big win with its latest generation of cards if it wants to regain ground from Nvidia, and the RX 9070 series might be just what the GPU market needs.
Hardware
AMD hasnât created reference cards for the RX 9070 series, so the end result is designs from add-in board partners that look very similar to the ones used for previous generations …
Microsoft is finally rolling out a native version of its Copilot Windows app, nearly a year after turning it into a basic web app. A new Copilot app is rolling out to Windows Insiders this week that’s built using native XAML and includes a new side panel and an improved UI.
The Copilot app on Windows now matches the design of the recently launched Copilot app for macOS, which lets you upload images and generate images or text. You can also interact with Copilot using a microphone, and access conversation history in the updated sidebar.
This new Copilot app is rolling out to all Windows Insiders first through the Microsoft Store, which means it should appear on all Windows 11 PCs in the coming weeks.
The RTX 50-series launch hasnât gone smoothly so far. Severely limited stock, high prices, and manufacturing issues have left PC gamers frustrated. Now, Nvidia is trying to get things heading in the right direction with the RTX 5070, a GPU that it promised would deliver $1,599 RTX 4090-like performance for $549.
It doesnât, and it was never going to. Itâs about 20 percent faster than the RTX 4070 and a bare 4 percent faster than last yearâs RTX 4070 Super. Itâs a solid card for 1440p gaming, just like the RTX 4070, but as with the rest of the 50-series cards, Nvidiaâs performance claims rely on Frame Generation rather than meaningful improvements to rendering.
At $549, the RTX 5070 will also come up against AMDâs new $549 Radeon RX 9070 and $599 Radeon RX 9070 XT when they launch on March 6th. If AMD manages to beat Nvidiaâs RTX 5070 or come close to the $749 RTX 5070 Ti, thatâs going to put a lot of much-needed pressure on Nvidiaâs pricing.
You might want to wait a couple of days to purchase anything until we can talk about those AMD cards.
It’s the end of an era. Microsoft is shutting down Skype in May and replacing it with the free version of Microsoft Teams for consumers. Existing Skype users will be able to log in to the Microsoft Teams app and have their message history, group chats, and contacts all automatically available without having to create another account, or they can choose to export their data instead. Microsoft is also phasing out support for calling domestic or international numbers.
“Skype users will be in control, they’ll have the choice,” says Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, in an interview with The Verge. “They can migrate their conversation history and their contacts out and move on if they want, or they can migrate to Teams.”
If you choose to move on and bring your Skype data with you, the exported data will include photos and conversation history. Microsoft also made a tool to easily view existing Skype chat history if you don’t want to move to Teams.
Skype will remain online until May 5th, so existing users will have around 60 days to decide whether they want to switch to Microsoft Teams or export their data. “If they do want to come to Teams then the first-run is pretty instantaneous because we’ve already done the work on the backend to restore their contacts, message history, and call logs,” says Amit Fulay, vice president of product at Microsoft.
The transition to Microsoft Teams will keep Skype group chats intact, and during the 60-day window, Microsoft will also maintain interoperability so you can message contacts on Teams and those messages will be delivered to friends still using Skype.
If you do move to Microsoft Teams, there’s one big part of Skype that’s disappearing, though. Microsoft is removing the telephony parts that allow you to call domestic or international numbers or people’s cellphones. “Part of the reason is we look at the usage and the trends, and this functionality was great at the time when voice over IP (VoIP) wasn’t available and mobile data plans were very expensive,” explains Fulay. “If we look at the future, that’s not a thing we want to be in.”
Microsoft will honor existing Skype credits, but it will no longer offer new customers access to paid Skype features that allow you to make or receive international and domestic calls. Existing Skype subscription users will be able to use their Skype credits and subscriptions inside Microsoft Teams until the end of their next renewal period. Existing Skype Number users will also need to port their number over to another provider, as Microsoft is no longer supporting this, either.
The Skype Dial Pad will be part of Teams temporarily for existing credits and subscriptions, but Microsoft isn’t going to offer calling plans to Teams consumers like it does for businesses. “The world has really moved on,” says Teper. “Probably the biggest thing is higher bandwidth and lower data plan cost, from us and others, has really driven almost all of the traffic to VoIP.”
The admission of consumers moving on from calling phone numbers from Skype is also a large part of why the service is shutting down nearly 14 years after Microsoft first acquired it for $8.5 billion. Over the last decade, services like FaceTime, Messenger, and WhatsApp have made it simple to connect with friends through messaging, calls, and video chats in a way that Microsoft struggled to compete with through Skype and its many design iterations.
This was particularly evident in the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic, when consumers flocked to Zoom instead of Skype. “The Skype userbase actually grew at the beginning of the pandemic, and has been pretty flat since,” admits Teper. “It’s not shrunk in some dramatic way. It has been relatively flat over the last few years. We hope we’ll migrate most Skype users… but we want to make sure the users know they’re in control.”
Microsoft will now be fully focused on Teams for consumers, after launching the personal version in 2020. At the time, Microsoft said it was still fully committed to Skype, but it’s been clear in recent years that the company was preparing for the eventual retirement of Skype. In December, Microsoft killed off Skype credits and phone numbers in favor of subscriptions, another sign that the end of Skype was nearing.
“Initially the vision was to have one experience across work and life… but Teams was new and that was not realistically where we were in 2020,” reveals Teper. “So we continued to invest in Skype, and about two to three years ago we started bringing in the free Teams consumer experience with the new client. We wanted to wait until the adoption was at the scale where we could be very convinced it was the right time.”
The Skype retirement won’t result in job cuts, either, at least not immediately. “There’s one team, which is Microsoft Teams and Skype. On the backend it has actually evolved to a common team,” says Teper. “There won’t be layoffs, those folks are going to be working on making things better — whether it’s fun end user features or AI innovation, it’s really about doubling down on Teams.”
AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs is arriving next week — and its new graphics cards are aggressively priced against Nvidia’s $749 GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and $549 RTX 5070. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT ship on March 6th for $549 and $599, respectively, one day after the RTX 5070 arrives.
AMD says they both offer “4K gaming at a 1440p price,” though it’s making some unusual comparisons to do so — according to AMD, the 9070 XT is 51 percent faster on average than a four-year-old RX 6900 XT at 4K and max settings and 26 percent faster than a four-year-old RTX 3090 at the same settings, cards that filled a pricey niche two generations ago.
While leaks had suggested the pricing of AMD’s 9070 could start at $649, AMD surprised everyone today with suggested retail prices at $549 for this card — putting it head-to-head with Nvidia’s $549 RTX 5070. The $599 9700 XT could even challenge Nvidia’s $749 pricing for its RTX 5070 Ti, as long as AMD has managed to deliver performance that can challenge both of these RTX 50-series cards.
We won’t know the full answer to that until reviews for AMD’s cards appear next week as well as reviews for Nvidia’s RTX 5070. AMD is dropping some performance hints about where its 9070 series cards might fit in, though. AMD says the 9070 XT is 42 percent more potent at 4K Ultra (and 38 percent at 1440p Ultra) than AMD’s RX 7900 GRE, a card that challenged the RTX 4070 at $549 but vanished after less than a year. And it’s “just barely slightly slower” than a 7900 XTX, AMD’s 2022 flagship, we heard on a call.
The vanilla RX 9070, meanwhile, is 21 percent faster than the same 7900 GRE at 4K, suggesting it’s not far off the XT in performance: 38 percent faster than the AMD 6800 XT and 26 percent faster than the Nvidia RTX 3080, according to AMD. At 220 watts of board power, AMD’s director of graphics product management, Scott Olschewsky, says the 4nm monolithic chip is “the most efficient GPU we’ve ever built.”
Each card also offers 16GB of GDDR6 memory, DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b ports, and are PCIe 5.0 cards — not that your motherboard needs a 5.0 new slot or would necessarily benefit from one. They will use standard 8-pin PCIe power connectors.
While both the 9070 and 9070 XT have far fewer graphics compute units than the 7900 GRE (55, 64, and 80, respectively), they don’t need as many because they’re the first cards to ship with RDNA 4, which AMD says offers twice the rasterization (read: non-ray traced) graphics performance per compute unit as RDNA 2. (RDNA 3 was closer to 1.4x that of RDNA 2.)
AMD says it’s taken larger steps than that in ray tracing, too, and almost fully doubled its FP16 machine learning performance since RDNA 3, and up to 779 TOPS, though performance will differ from app to app: AMD’s only seeing 12 percent more performance in Adobe Lightroom super resolution over the 7900 GRE, as one example.
But even if you’re not playing with AI very intentionally, AMD will put that hardware to use in gaming with FSR 4, which comes with a new AI upscaling algorithm for its super resolution tech that’ll exclusively run on these RDNA 4 and newer cards.
Olschewsky says FSR 4 can increase frame rates “while looking just as good as native rendering” at 4K resolution. AMD used some images from Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 — a title that averages just 53fps at 4K Ultra settings — to show more fine detail in the distant background of an image while averaging at 182fps with FSR 4 and frame generation turned on.
And while AMD didn’t share expected performance for that game without the fake frames added, it did break out the differences for a handful of other games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Ratchet & Clank:
AMD says it’ll have 30 FSR4 games at launch and over 75 by the end of the year — one obvious theme is a lot of PS5 games, making us wonder how closely the PS5 Pro’s “PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution,” an AI upscaler powered by AMD hardware, might be related to it. But AMD also says FSR 3.1 games can be updated to FSR 4 “with a simple toggle.”
The new cards also have an enhanced media engine with higher image quality for gameplay recording, as the last one “did not meet quality expectations from the gamers trying to record and stream.” AMD says its Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), its generic fake frame generation you can apply to any game yourself, is being upgraded to AFMF 2.1, with less ghosting and smearing of details.
As with any graphics card these days, the actual amount you pay will be determined by whether AMD can actually make enough of the things, and if AMD’s board partners don’t jack up the price. Olschewsky had some fighting words for Nvidia there, though: “We believe that our 9070 XT will be going toe-to-toe with what you’ve seen from the 5070 Ti that users may or may not be able to buy,” adding that the 9070 “is going to look very strong against their upcoming 5070.”
Unlike Nvidia, which warned of shortages with its new cards, he says AMD expects “strong availability at launch.”
“We are working with all of our partners to go and deliver the most competitive prices on GPUs around the world; our focus is ensuring cards hit target price points around the world. It’s difficult to predict what’s going to happen, but we’ll be working with partners as we see pricing show up.”
At the end of AMD’s event today the company also teased that its RX 9060 series cards will arrive in the second quarter to “broaden the family even further.” AMD plans to disclose more information about these cards “later,” but it certainly looks like it’s getting ready to challenge Nvidia’s unannounced RTX 5060 cards.
Microsoft is releasing a native Copilot app for macOS today. Much like the Windows app, the Copilot version for Mac will provide access to the web-based version of Microsoft’s AI assistant, where you can upload images and generate images or text.
The macOS version of Copilot also includes a dark mode and a shortcut command to activate the AI assistant by using Command + Space — much like the Alt + Space on the Windows version. Microsoft is launching this new Copilot Mac app in the US, UK, and Canada today, and the iPad version is also being updated with a split screen mode.
You’ll also now be able to log into Copilot on an iPhone or iPad with an Apple ID, and upload text or PDF files to ask questions about the documents or generate a summary about them. This document summarization feature is also coming to the macOS app soon.
The launch of Copilot on macOS comes just days after Microsoft made Copilot Voice and Think Deeper free with unlimited use. Previously, both Think Deeper (powered by OpenAI’s o1 model) and Voice in Copilot had limits for free users, but Microsoft has now removed these to allow Copilot users to have extended conversations with the company’s AI assistant.
OpenAI is launching GPT-4.5 today, its newest and largest AI language model. GPT-4.5 will be available as a research preview for ChatGPT Pro users to start. OpenAI is calling the release its “most knowledgeable model yet,” but initially warned that GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model and might not perform as well as o1 or o3-mini.
GPT-4.5 will have better writing capabilities, improved world knowledge, and what OpenAI calls a “refined personality over previous models.” OpenAI says interacting with GPT 4.5 will feel more “natural,” adding that the model is better at recognizing patterns and drawing connections, making it ideal for writing, programming, and “solving practical problems.”
However, OpenAI notes it won’t introduce enough new capabilities to be considered a frontier model. “GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model, but it is OpenAI’s largest LLM, improving on GPT-4’s computational efficiency by more than 10x,” OpenAI said in a document that leaked ahead of its announcement. “It does not introduce 7 net-new frontier capabilities compared to previous reasoning releases, and its performance is below that of o1, o3-mini, and deep research on most preparedness evaluations.” OpenAI has since removed this mention from an updated version of the document.
It was previously reported that OpenAI was using its o1 reasoning model, codenamed Strawberry, to train GPT-4.5 with synthetic data. OpenAI says it has trained GPT-4.5 “using new supervision techniques combined with traditional methods like supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), similar to those used for GPT-4o.”
Despite some of its limitations, GPT-4.5 hallucinates a lot less than GPT-4o, according to OpenAI, and slightly less than its o1 model. “We aligned GPT-4.5 to be a better collaborator, making conversations feel warmer, more intuitive, and emotionally nuanced,” Raphael Gontijo Lopes, a researcher at OpenAI, said during the company’s livestream. “To measure this, we asked human testers to evaluate it against GPT-4o, and GPT-4.5 outperformed on basically every category.”
In a post on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that GPT-4.5 is a “giant, expensive model” and that it “won’t crush benchmarks.”
Following its launch for Pro users, OpenAI says GPT-4.5 will roll out to Plus and Team users next week and then to Enterprise and Edu users after that. It’s also available now in Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry platform, along with new models from Stability, Cohere, and Microsoft.
We revealed in Notepad last week that OpenAI was planning to launch GPT-4.5 by the end of February, and GPT-5 as soon as late May. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has referred to GPT-5 as a “system that integrates a lot of our technology,” and it will include OpenAI’s new o3 reasoning model, which the company teased during its 12 days of Christmas announcements in December.
While OpenAI released o3-mini last month, OpenAI is only shipping o3 as part of its upcoming GPT-5 system. This aligns with OpenAI’s goal to combine its large language models to eventually create a more capable model that could be labeled as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
Update, February 27th:Noted that OpenAI changed its GPT-4.5 system card and added information from Sam Altman.
Microsoft might say its top priority right now is security, but itâs been clear for months that AI is just as important. The odd division out has been Xbox, which hasnât discussed its use of AI much in public. But that changed last week when Microsoft ripped the band-aid off and waded, somewhat clumsily, into the debate over AI in gaming.
Last Wednesday, Microsoft revealed Muse, its new AI model that can generate gameplay. It was trained on Ninja Theoryâs Xbox game Bleeding Edge, and it can understand a 3D world and physics and then respond to playersâ interactions. While Muse is a Microsoft Research project at heart, Microsoft presented it in a way that linked it directly to Xbox and the future of the companyâs gaming efforts. That has divided opinion between those who argue that Microsoft will use this model to build games and lay off developers, and others who think this is still very early and simply another tool in a game developerâs kit.
Iâve been speaking to game developers over the past week to get a better understanding of the response to Muse. Of the handful Iâve spoken to, no one is willing to speak on the record for reasons like career concerns and th …
Sony is cutting the price of its PlayStation VR 2 headset in March. The VR 2 will be discounted to just $399.99, down from the original $549 pricing when it launched in February 2023. The headset will also see a price cut in Europe (€449.99), the UK (£399.99), Japan (¥66,980), and other regions.
Sony is positioning the price cut as a “fantastic time to dive into the exciting world of PS VR2,” but it also comes nearly a year after the company reportedly paused PSVR 2 production to clear excess inventory nearly . A Bloomberg report in March suggested Sony was trying to shift unsold inventory of the VR2 headset, and this fresh price cut suggests that the PS5 accessory still isn’t selling as well as Sony had hoped.
At $549, it was more expensive than the PS5 itself, and a lack of content has certainly held it back. The $399 pricing could certainly help shift units, particularly as you can also use the VR 2 headset on a PC now thanks to Sony’s $60 adapter. Sony is also reportedly working on Apple Vision Pro support for its PSVR 2 controllers, which we might hear about at some point this year.
Microsoft made OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model free for all Copilot users last month, and now it’s providing unlimited use of this model and Copilot’s voice capabilities to everyone. Previously, both Think Deeper (powered by o1) and Voice in Copilot had limits for free users, but Microsoft is removing these today to allow Copilot users to have extended conversations with the company’s AI assistant.
“We are working hard to scale unlimited access to advanced features to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, starting today with Voice and Think Deeper,” says the Copilot team. “It’s worth noting you may experience delays or interruptions during periods of high demand or if we detect security concerns, misuse or other violations of the Copilot Terms.“
The unlimited use of Copilot Voice and Think Deeper comes two years after Microsoft first launched Copilot inside its Bing search engine, and just a month after the software maker revamped its Copilot Pro subscription and bundled Office AI features into Microsoft 365.
Microsoft is continuing to sell its $20 per month Copilot Pro subscription, and says users “will retain preferred access to our latest models during peak usage, early access to experimental AI features (more on that coming soon), and additional use of Copilot in select Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.”
Microsoft has decided to delay the release window of its upcoming Fable game to 2026. The Xbox maker originally said last year that Fable would arrive at some point in 2025, but now Xbox Game Studios chief Craig Duncan has provided an update on the game during an appearance on the official Xbox podcast.
“We previously announced the date for Fable as 2025, we are actually going to give Fable more time and it’s going to ship in 2026 now,” says Duncan. “While I know that’s not maybe the news people want to hear, what I want to assure people of is that it’s definitely worth the wait. I have unequivocable confidence in the Playground team.”
We got to see some early gameplay footage of Fable at last year’s Xbox summer showcase, which was largely focused on the characters and story of the fantasy game. Fable will be centered on a hero named Humphry, who “will be forced out of retirement when a mysterious figure from his past threatens Albion’s very existence.” Microsoft provided a little more gameplay footage today, too.
Playground Games is the developer behind this latest Fable installment, best-known for their work on the Forza Horizon series. “What they’re bringing to the Fable franchise, just think of the visuals of what you expect from Playground Games, plus amazing gameplay, British humor, and Playground’s take… in quite frankly the most beautifully realized version of Albion that you’ve ever seen,” says Duncan.
Microsoft still has a busy year of Xbox games ahead, including South of Midnight, id Software’s Doom: The Dark Ages, The Outer Worlds 2, and potentially even Gears of War: E-Day.
Microsoft has started testing a free version of Office for Windows that includes ads. Right now, you have to pay for a monthly Microsoft 365 subscription to get access to the full desktop version of Office, but Microsoft has been quietly testing an ad-supported version in certain countries.
Beebom first noticed that the ad-supported version of Office for Windows appeared in India recently, allowing Windows users to access Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office apps without the Microsoft 365 subscription fee.
“Microsoft has been conducting some limited testing. Currently, there are no plans to launch a free, ad-supported version of Microsoft Office desktop apps,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to PCWorld. While Microsoft claims this is limited testing, the company has specifically engineered its Office apps to now work on Windows with ads, so we may well see this version appear in more markets eventually.
The ad-supported version of Office includes banners that are permanently visible at the side, as well as 15-second video ads that play every few hours, according to Beebom. Microsoft also forces users of this free version of Office to store documents in OneDrive, with support for local file storage disabled.
Microsoft currently only offers free versions of Office on the web, so you have to use a browser to access far more limited versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This test version of Office for Windows doesn’t include the full features of the apps, either. Word is missing drawing and design tools, line spacing, and more. The free version of Excel doesn’t support add-ins, pivot tables, or macros. PowerPoint is also missing support for dictation, custom slide shows, and other features.
Microsoft engineers are currently readying server capacity for OpenAIâs upcoming GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 models, according to a source familiar with the companyâs plans. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altmanacknowledged recently that GPT-4.5 will launch within a matter of weeks, I understand that Microsoft is expecting to host the new AI model as early as next week.
Codenamed Orion, GPT-4.5 is OpenAIâs next frontier model and the companyâs last non-chain-of-thought model. OpenAI has already teased that GPT-4.5 could be a lot more powerful than GPT-4, but the company is also looking ahead to its GPT-5 model that will include more significant changes.
Iâm told that Microsoft is expecting GPT-5 in late May, which aligns with Altmanâs promise of the next-gen model arriving within a matter of months. As always, this date could shift if release plans change. We reported in October that OpenAI was originally planning to release GPT-4.5 by the end of 2024, but this was subsequently delayed to early 2025.
GPT-5 will likely be the more significant release out of the pair, and Altman has referred to it as a âsystem that integrates a lot of our technology.â It also includes OpenAIâs new …
Microsoft believes it has made a key breakthrough in quantum computing, unlocking the potential for quantum computers to solve industrial-scale problems. The software giant has spent 17 years working on a research project to create a new material and architecture for quantum computing, and it’s unveiling the Majorana 1 processor, Microsoft’s first quantum processor based on this new architecture.
At the core of a quantum computer are qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing much like the binary bits that computers use today. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google have all been trying to make qubits as reliable as binary bits for years now because they’re a lot more delicate and sensitive to noise that can create errors or lead to loss of data.
Majorana 1 can potentially fit a million qubits onto a single chip that’s not much bigger than the CPUs inside desktop PCs and servers. Microsoft isn’t using electrons for the compute in this new chip; it’s using the Majorana particle that theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana described in 1937. Microsoft has reached this milestone by creating what it calls the “world’s first topoconductor,” a new type of material that can not only observe but also control Majorana particles to create more reliable qubits.
Microsoft has outlined its research in a peer-reviewed paper published today in Nature, explaining how its researchers were able to create the topological qubit. Microsoft has helped create a new material made from indium arsenide and aluminum, and it has placed eight topological qubits on a chip that it hopes can eventually scale to 1 million.
A single chip with a million qubits could perform simulations that are a lot more accurate and help improve the understanding of the natural world and unlock breakthroughs in medicine and material science. That’s been the promise of quantum computing for years now, and Microsoft believes its topoconductor, or topological superconductor, is the next big breakthrough.
“Our leadership has been working on this program for the last 17 years. It’s the longest-running research program in the company,” explains Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president of quantum at Microsoft. “After 17 years, we are showcasing results that are not just incredible, they’re real. They will fundamentally redefine how the next stage of the quantum journey takes place.”
Alam previously worked on HoloLens and the fabrication techniques that have helped Microsoft in its push toward quantum computing. Microsoft’s quantum computing team is made up of researchers, scientists, and Microsoft technical fellows that have dedicated years to the company’s effort to build a scalable quantum computer based on topological qubits.
“We took a step back and said ‘Ok, let’s invent the transistor for the quantum age. What properties does it need to have?’” says Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow. “And that’s really how we got here — it’s the particular combination, the quality and the important details in our new materials stack that have enabled a new kind of qubit and ultimately our entire architecture.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has now selected Microsoft as one of two companies that will advance to the final phase of its Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC). Microsoft will now build a fault-tolerant prototype quantum computer based on topological qubits “in years, not decades.”
“A million-qubit quantum computer isn’t just a milestone — it’s a gateway to solving some of the world’s most difficult problems,” says Nayak. “Our path to useful quantum computing is clear. The foundational technology is proven, and we believe our architecture is scalable. Our new agreement with DARPA shows a commitment to relentless progress toward our goal: building a machine that can drive scientific discovery and solve problems that matter.“
I reported in November that Microsoft was about to start a bigger effort to bring AI features to Xbox, and today, the company is unveiling what it’s calling a breakthrough in AI for gaming. Microsoft’s new Muse AI model could help Xbox developers create parts of games in the future, and the company says it’s even exploring the potential of using it to preserve classic games and optimize them for modern hardware.
Microsoft Research has created Muse, a first-of-its-kind generative AI model that can generate a game environment based on visuals or players’ controller actions. It understands a 3D game world and game physics and can react to how players interact with a game.
“This allows the model to create consistent and diverse gameplay rendered by AI, demonstrating a major step toward generative AI models that can empower game creators,” explains Fatima Kardar, corporate vice president of gaming AI at Microsoft.
The Muse model was trained on a large amount of human gameplay data from the Xbox game Bleeding Edge thanks to a collaboration between Microsoft Research and Xbox studio Ninja Theory — both of which are based in Cambridge in the UK. “This partnership allowed us to closely collaborate with the game studio to understand what needs to be in place and how we can responsibly unlock access to a large amount of gameplay data,” says Katja Hofmann, head of Microsoft Research’s game intelligence team.
This allowed Muse to access the equivalent of seven years of human gameplay, resulting in the model being trained on a billion image action pairs in total. It’s a milestone research project that’s being published in Nature today, but as it’s early work, the model is limited to generating gameplay visuals at a resolution of just 300×180 pixels. That’s up from the 128 x 128 resolution of Microsoft’s earlier work on generative AI gaming models, but it’s still far behind the 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution that is common among PC gamers.
Microsoft has released a number of examples of the Muse model in action, generating gameplay and even allowing players to load visual elements into the game to prompt the model. This could be used for the early iteration stages of a game, but Microsoft is stressing this isn’t designed to generate an entire game and replace creators.
Gaming is coming to Copilot! Get your keyboards/controllers ready, I can't wait for you to try it out.
“For Xbox, the principles that drive our approach to AI are to create more value for players and game creators, bring more games to more people around the world, and recognize that the development of a great game will always be grounded in the creator’s vision and artistry,” says Kardar. “We believe generative AI has the potential to enhance this creativity and unlock new possibilities.”
During a press briefing, Hofmann also demonstrated a real-time version of Muse that Microsoft is currently experimenting with to enable interactive AI-powered games. The demo generated game visuals on the fly in real time and even reacted to objects being dropped into the game to change the environment. While the real-time gameplay only ran at 10fps and a 300×180 resolution, it was an early demonstration of what might be possible in the future.
Microsoft is now exploring how Muse could help improve classic games and bring them to modern hardware. “You could imagine a world where from gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run,” says Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer. “We’ve talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity.”
Microsoft is also exploring how Muse can help game developers prototype games or how teams could add new AI-powered experiences to existing titles. Some short interactive AI game experiences will be available on Copilot Labs soon for people to try out. Microsoft is also planning to share AI tools and experiments with Xbox players and creators “earlier on” so that it can “make sure that our AI innovations address real problems and add new value to creating or playing with Xbox.”
While Microsoft is still in the exploration phase of AI in gaming, it’s also making it clear it’s up to individual studios at Xbox how they want to use AI in games. “As part of this, we have empowered creative leaders here at Xbox to decide on the use of generative AI. There isn’t going to be a single solution for every game or project, and the approach will be based on the creative vision and goals of each team,” says Kardar.
There is already a lot of fear from game developers and studios about how AI could affect the creative process of making games, particularly at a time when barely a week goes by without layoffs in the gaming industry. A recent report revealed that 1 in 10 game developers lost their jobs in 2024 alone.
“We don’t intend to use this technology for the creation of content,” says Ninja Theory studio head Dom Matthews. “I think the interesting aspect for us that’s exciting, is how can we use technology like this to make the process of making games quicker and easier for our talented team, so that they can really focus on the thing that’s really special about games: the human creativity.”
Nvidiaâs new RTX 5070 Ti graphics card is the most intriguing entry in the 50-series lineup so far, promising to outperform last-gen cards that were even more expensive. At $749, it comfortably beats AMDâs $899 RX 7900 XT, trades blows with the $999 RX 7900 XTX, and is closer than I was expecting to Nvidiaâs own $999 RTX 5080. Itâs a capable card for a relatively good price, and that makes the RTX 5070 Ti an ideal choice if youâre tempted to move to 4K gaming or want a card that can deliver high frame rates for 1440p.
But like the rest of the 50-series cards, the RTX 5070 Ti is not as much of an upgrade as weâve come to expect from Nvidia. The card is around 14 percent faster at 4K than the last-generation RTX 4070 Ti and 22 percent faster at 1440p. Itâs nearly as fast as the RTX 4080 Super, which launched at $999, and itâs more than 80 percent faster at 4K than the two-generations-old RTX 3070 Ti. Those are decent numbers, but itâs mostly because the 40 series was such a big leap.
All of this makes the RTX 5070 Ti a good deal at its $749 MSRP, but only if it stays there â and prices are already going up.
Editorâs note: We arenât scoring the RTX 5070 T …
Microsoft was planning to make some changes to the way you sign in to a Microsoft account in February, keeping accounts signed in automatically unless you sign out or use private browsing. While the changes were communicated to Outlook.com users through a notification and in a now-removed Microsoft support article, Microsoft has now confirmed to The Verge that this was a mistake.
“There will be no changes to Microsoft users’ commercial (Microsoft Entra) or consumer (Microsoft account) sign in experiences in February,” confirms Alex Simons, corporate vice president of identity & network access program management at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. “Media reports were based on incomplete information mistakenly published by a Microsoft product team. The incorrect notifications have been removed.”
Microsoft hasn’t clarified when it plans to eventually roll out these changes after the mistaken notifications, but once they arrive it means you’ll no longer be asked if you want to stay signed in, and Microsoft will automatically keep you signed in instead.
Once Microsoft starts to automatically keep you signed in you’ll have to use a private browsing window on public PCs or make sure you remember to sign out once your session ends, otherwise the account will remain signed in.
Microsoft is adding a super useful button to Outlook mobile that will let you quickly minimize a draft email and task switch on the go. If you’re like me and you send a lot of emails from your iPhone or Android device, it can be really annoying to have to switch out of a draft email and find a date in your calendar or look at another email thread and then have to navigate back to your drafts folder and resume your email.
Outlook’s new minimize button will put all your recent drafts into a little floating stack so you can switch between composing an email and looking at other emails or calendar events without having to head back into the drafts folder. It’s a small change that will make a big difference to drafting emails on the go with Outlook.
Microsoft has started testing this new minimize button in beta versions of Outlook on iOS and Android recently, and in the short couple of days I’ve been testing the feature it has already made something I do every day a lot faster and convenient.
Apple has a similar method for task switching during emails in its native Mail app for iOS, and it also supports multiple email drafts where you can simply swipe down to add them to a task switching area. Gmail, on iOS at least, simply stores emails in the draft folder when you want to switch out to your inbox.
The minimize button in Outlook mobile is also starting to gradually roll out to all users, but you can sign up to the Microsoft 365 Insider program if you want to get it a little early.
Iâve been thinking a lot about the next Xbox lately. While Microsoft publicly lines up a busy year of game releases and ports for the PS5 and Switch 2, the company has also been secretly building its future Xbox hardware and platform. There havenât been any giant leaks about next-gen hardware yet, but Microsoft has been dropping hints over the past year that make it clear the next Xbox is going to be a lot different from the box that exists right now.
Microsoft is developing new console hardware that Xbox president Sarah Bond has said will deliver âthe largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation.â Weâve heard very little about next-gen hardware since that promise a year ago, and a lot has changed since internal documents from 2022 leaked and hinted that the next Xbox could arrive in 2028.
Xbox chief Phil Spencer said in a recent interview that he wants Microsoft âto innovate and make hardware the differentiator.â Spencer told me something similar a year ago, saying that Microsoft is âthinking about creating hardware that sells to gamers because of the unique aspects of the hardware. Itâs kind of an unleashing of the creative capabili …
