Last week, a ResetEra user discovered that the new Gaming Copilot AI installed by Microsoft on all Windows 11 PCs (integrated directly into the Game Bar) was training itself by screenshotting every game played by the user and then sending everything back to Microsoft. Gaming Copilot is also enabled by default, so if you want to turn it off, you need to go to the Game Bar, and then to Settings and Privacy Settings, where you will find the option for Gaming Copilot to pull "Model training on text" or not. Needless to say, this discovery sparked a big controversy […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/microsoft-comments-gaming-copilot-ai-controversy/
From empty offices in 2020 to AI colleagues in 2025, the way we work has been completely rewired over the past five years. Our guest on this week’s GeekWire Podcast studies these changes closely along with her colleagues at Microsoft.
Colette Stallbaumer is the co-founder of Microsoft WorkLab, general manager of Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the author of the new book, WorkLab: Five years that shook the business world and sparked an AI-first future, from Microsoft’s 8080 Books.
As Stallbaumer explains in the book, the five-year period starting with the pandemic and continuing to the current era of AI represents one continuous transformation in the way we work, and it’s not over yet.
“Change is the only constant—shifting norms that once took decades to unfold now materialize in months or weeks,” she writes. “As we look to the next five years, it’s nearly impossible to imagine how much more work will change.”
Listen below for our conversation, recorded on Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Subscribe on Apple or Spotify, and continue reading for key insights from the conversation.
The ‘Hollywood model’ of teams: “What we’re seeing is this movement in teams, where we’ll stand up a small squad of people who bring their own domain expertise, but also have AI added into the mix. They come together just like you would to produce a film. A group of people comes together to produce a blockbuster, and then you disperse and go back to your day job.”
The concept of the ‘frontier firm’: “They’re not adding AI as an ingredient. AI is the business model. It’s the core. And these frontier firms can have a small number of people using AI in this way, generating a pretty high run rate. So it’s a whole new way to think about shipping, creating, and innovating.”
The fallacy of ‘AI strategy’: “The idea that you just need to have an ‘AI strategy’ is a bit of a fallacy. Really, you kind of want to start with the business problem and then apply AI. … Where are you spending the most and where do you have the biggest challenges? Those are great areas to actually think about putting AI to work for you.”
Adapting to AI: “You have to build the habit and build the muscle to work in this new way and have that moment of, ‘Oh, wait, I don’t actually need to do this.’ “
The biggest risk related to AI: “The biggest risk is not AI in and of itself. It’s that people won’t evolve fast enough with AI. It’s the human risk and ability to actually start to really use these new tools and build the habit.”
Human creativity and AI: “It still takes that spark and that seed of creativity. And then when you combine it with these new tools, that’s where I have a lot of hope and optimism for what people are going to be able to do and invent in the future.”
Audio editing by Curt Milton.
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Microsoft is rolling out a series of updates to its consumer Copilot AI assistant, including shared group chats, long-term memory, and an optional visual persona named Mico.
New capabilities include a “real talk” conversation style, a Learn Live feature that acts as a voice-enabled Socratic tutor, new connectors that link to services like Google Drive, Gmail, and Outlook, and deeper integration with Microsoft’s Edge browser.
Microsoft is competing against AI tools including Google’s Gemini, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s revamped Siri, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude in the consumer market.
It looks to be the single biggest Copilot update to date from the group led by Mustafa Suleyman, the Google DeepMind co-founder who joined Microsoft last year as its AI CEO.
“This release is a milestone for what AI can deliver,” Suleyman writes in a blog post, explaining that the idea is to make Copilot a comprehensive assistant that connects users to their personal information, contacts, and tools with the goal of improving their lives.
The features are rolling out starting today in the U.S, and the company says they will be available soon in the UK, Canada, and other parts of the world. Microsoft is showing the new features in the live stream below.
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