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Even Microsoft’s retro holiday sweaters are having Copilot forced upon them

Microsoft has not one, not two, but three new sweaters available for $60 to $80.

I can take or leave some of the things that Microsoft is doing with Windows 11 these days, but I do usually enjoy the company’s yearly limited-time holiday sweater releases. Usually crafted around a specific image or product from the company’s ’90s-and-early-2000s heyday—2022’s sweater was Clippy themed, and 2023’s was just the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper in sweater form—the sweaters usually hit the exact combination of dorky/cute/recognizable that makes for a good holiday party conversation starter.

Microsoft is reviving the tradition for 2025 after taking a year off, and the design for this year’s flagship $80 sweater is mostly in line with what the company has done in past years. The 2025 “Artifact Holiday Sweater” revives multiple pixelated icons that Windows 3.1-to-XP users will recognize, including Notepad, Reversi, Paint, MS-DOS, Internet Explorer, and even the MSN butterfly logo. Clippy is, once again, front and center, looking happy to be included.

Not all of the icons are from Microsoft’s past; a sunglasses-wearing emoji, a “50” in the style of the old flying Windows icon (for Microsoft’s 50th anniversary), and a Minecraft Creeper face all nod to the company’s more modern products. But the only one I really take issue with is on the right sleeve, where Microsoft has stuck a pixelated monochrome icon for its Copilot AI assistant.

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Microsoft makes Zork I, II, and III open source under MIT License

Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office worked with Jason Scott to do it.

Zork, the classic text-based adventure game of incalculable influence, has been made available under the MIT License, along with the sequels Zork II and Zork III.

The move to take these Zork games open source comes as the result of the shared work of the Xbox and Activision teams along with Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). Parent company Microsoft owns the intellectual property for the franchise.

Only the code itself has been made open source. Ancillary items like commercial packaging and marketing assets and materials remain proprietary, as do related trademarks and brands.

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Critics scoff after Microsoft warns AI feature can infect machines and pilfer data

Integration of Copilot Actions into Windows is off by default, but for how long?

Microsoft’s warning on Tuesday that an experimental AI Agent integrated into Windows can infect devices and pilfer sensitive user data has set off a familiar response from security-minded critics: Why is Big Tech so intent on pushing new features before their dangerous behaviors can be fully understood and contained?

As reported Tuesday, Microsoft introduced Copilot Actions, a new set of “experimental agentic features” that, when enabled, perform “everyday tasks like organizing files, scheduling meetings, or sending emails,” and provide “an active digital collaborator that can carry out complex tasks for you to enhance efficiency and productivity.”

Hallucinations and prompt injections apply

The fanfare, however, came with a significant caveat. Microsoft recommended users enable Copilot Actions only “if you understand the security implications outlined.”

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Tech giants pour billions into Anthropic as circular AI investments roll on

ChatGPT competitor secures billions from Microsoft and Nvidia in deal to use cloud services and chips.

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Nvidia announced plans to invest in Anthropic under a new partnership that includes a $30 billion commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services. Nvidia will commit up to $10 billion to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5 billion, with both companies investing in Anthropic’s next funding round.

The deal brings together two companies that have backed OpenAI and connects them more closely to one of the ChatGPT maker’s main competitors. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video that OpenAI “remains a critical partner,” while adding that the companies will increasingly be customers of each other.

“We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure, and we’ll go to market together,” Nadella said.

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Microsoft tries to head off the “novel security risks” of Windows 11 AI agents

Agents with read/write access to your files create big security, privacy issues.

Microsoft has been adding AI features to Windows 11 for years, but things have recently entered a new phase, with both generative and so-called “agentic” AI features working their way deeper into the bedrock of the operating system. A new build of Windows 11 released to Windows Insider Program testers yesterday includes a new “experimental agentic features” toggle in the Settings to support a feature called Copilot Actions, and Microsoft has published a detailed support article detailing more about just how those “experimental agentic features” will work.

If you’re not familiar, “agentic” is a buzzword that Microsoft has used repeatedly to describe its future ambitions for Windows 11—in plainer language, these agents are meant to accomplish assigned tasks in the background, allowing the user’s attention to be turned elsewhere. Microsoft says it wants agents to be capable of “everyday tasks like organizing files, scheduling meetings, or sending emails,” and that Copilot Actions should give you “an active digital collaborator that can carry out complex tasks for you to enhance efficiency and productivity.”

But like other kinds of AI, these agents can be prone to error and confabulations and will often proceed as if they know what they’re doing even when they don’t. They also present, in Microsoft’s own words, “novel security risks,” mostly related to what can happen if an attacker is able to give instructions to one of these agents. As a result, Microsoft’s implementation walks a tightrope between giving these agents access to your files and cordoning them off from the rest of the system.

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Lilbits: Arduboy FX-C, AYANEO AM03, OneXFly Apex announcements… and maybe Windows 11 will actually shut down when it’s supposed to soon

Developer Kevin Bates has been making Arduboy handheld game consoles for more than a decade, bringing together Arduino hardware and support for 8-bit homebrew games into portable, programmable devices. The latest is the newly announced Arduboy FX-C, which brings some modern features like a USB-C port and some retro features… like support for playing multiplayer […]

The post Lilbits: Arduboy FX-C, AYANEO AM03, OneXFly Apex announcements… and maybe Windows 11 will actually shut down when it’s supposed to soon appeared first on Liliputing.

OpenAI signs massive AI compute deal with Amazon

Deal will provide access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips that power ChatGPT.

On Monday, OpenAI announced it has signed a seven-year, $38 billion deal to buy cloud services from Amazon Web Services to power products like ChatGPT and Sora. It’s the company’s first big computing deal after a fundamental restructuring last week that gave OpenAI more operational and financial freedom from Microsoft.

The agreement gives OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processors to train and run its AI models. “Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

OpenAI will reportedly use Amazon Web Services immediately, with all planned capacity set to come online by the end of 2026 and room to expand further in 2027 and beyond. Amazon plans to roll out hundreds of thousands of chips, including Nvidia’s GB200 and GB300 AI accelerators, in data clusters built to power ChatGPT’s responses, generate AI videos, and train OpenAI’s next wave of models.

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ChatGPT maker reportedly eyes $1 trillion IPO despite major quarterly losses

It could be “one of the biggest IPOs of all time,” according to Reuters.

On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Reuters during a livestream that going public “is the most likely path for us, given the capital needs that we’ll have.” Now sources familiar with the matter say the ChatGPT maker is preparing for an initial public offering that could value the company at up to $1 trillion, with filings possible as early as the second half of 2026. However, news of the potential IPO comes as the company faces mounting losses that may have reached as much as $11.5 billion in the most recent quarter, according to one estimate.

Going public could give OpenAI more efficient access to capital and enable larger acquisitions using public stock, helping finance Altman’s plans to spend trillions of dollars on AI infrastructure, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking who spoke with Reuters. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has reportedly told some associates the company targets a 2027 IPO listing, while some financial advisors predict 2026 could be possible.

Three people with knowledge of the plans told Reuters that OpenAI has discussed raising $60 billion at the low end in preliminary talks. That figure refers to how much money the company would raise by selling shares to investors, not the total worth of the company. If OpenAI sold that amount of stock while keeping most shares private, the entire company could be valued at $1 trillion or more. The final figures and timing will likely change based on business growth and market conditions.

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Nvidia hits record $5 trillion mark as CEO dismisses AI bubble concerns

“I don’t believe we’re in an AI bubble,” says Huang after announcing $500B in orders.

On Wednesday, Nvidia became the first company in history to reach a $5 trillion market capitalization, fresh on the heels of a GTC conference keynote in Washington, DC, where CEO Jensen Huang announced $500 billion in AI chip orders and plans to build seven supercomputers for the US government. The milestone comes a mere three months after Nvidia crossed the $4 trillion mark in July, vaulting the company past tech giants like Apple and Microsoft in market valuation but also driving continued fears of an AI investment bubble.

Nvidia’s shares have climbed nearly 12-fold since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, as the AI boom propelled the S&P 500 to record highs. Shares of Nvidia stock rose 4.6 percent on Wednesday following the Tuesday announcement at the company’s GTC conference. During a Bloomberg Television interview at the event, Huang dismissed concerns about overheated valuations, saying, “I don’t believe we’re in an AI bubble. All of these different AI models we’re using—we’re using plenty of services and paying happily to do it.”

Nvidia expects to ship 20 million units of its latest chips, compared to just 4 million units of the previous Hopper generation over its entire lifetime, Huang said at the conference. The $500 billion figure represents cumulative orders for the company’s Blackwell and Rubin processors through the end of 2026, though Huang noted that his projections did not include potential sales to China.

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Expert panel will determine AGI arrival in new Microsoft-OpenAI agreement

New deal extends Microsoft IP rights until 2032 or until AGI arrives.

On Monday, Microsoft and OpenAI announced a revised partnership agreement that introduces an independent expert panel to verify when OpenAI achieves so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI), a determination that will trigger major shifts in how the companies share technology and revenue. The deal values Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI at approximately $135 billion and extends the exclusive partnership through 2032 while giving both companies more freedom to pursue AGI independently.

The partnership began in 2019 when Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI. Since then, Microsoft has provided billions in cloud computing resources through Azure and used OpenAI’s models as the basis of products like Copilot. The new agreement maintains Microsoft as OpenAI’s frontier model partner and preserves Microsoft’s exclusive rights to OpenAI’s IP and Azure API exclusivity until the threshold of AGI is reached.

Under the previous arrangement, OpenAI alone would determine when it achieved AGI, which is a nebulous concept that is difficult to define. The revised deal requires an independent expert panel to verify that claim, a change that adds oversight to a determination with billions of dollars at stake. When the panel confirms that AGI has been reached, Microsoft’s intellectual property rights to OpenAI’s research methods will expire, and the revenue-sharing arrangement between the companies will end, though payments will continue over a longer period.

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