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Microsoft has made voluntary exit/buyout offers to roughly 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada and India as part of efforts to lower operating costs and shift investment toward AI infrastructure; eligible employees have until December to decide. The report also notes ongoing layoffs over the past year and the planned retirement of longtime Forza Motorsport lead Dan Greenawalt.
An on‑screen notification seen on an LG webOS TV and reported by Windows Central says Microsoft has decided to end Copilot functionality on all TVs, with discontinuation scheduled during 2026; no official statement or exact date has been published by Microsoft, LG, or Samsung. Copilot had been included on recent LG and Samsung TVs as an on‑screen AI assistant, while Microsoft has been repositioning Copilot toward a productivity "super app".
Microsoft is offering voluntary exit buyouts to up to 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada and India. Internal messages and sources say the program covers staff across many groups — including AI teams such as Copilot and CoreAI — while some business units (marketing, security, certain commercial teams) are not participating.
Microsoft says it will scale its Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments beginning in 2027 and make Maia the primary inference system for Microsoft services; Maia 200 is already in production for Copilot and MAI, with Maia 300 slated for production deployments in 2027. The Maia design emphasizes HBM4 memory stacks, chiplet NUMA-aware placement, and a custom Ethernet-based accelerator fabric that enables peer-to-peer tensor traffic, while Microsoft claims up to ~40% better tokens-per-megawatt vs leading GPU systems—a metric that practitioners have questioned and that Microsoft has not fully defined or independently validated.
Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, a new laptop powered by Nvidia’s Arm-based RTX Spark chip, with a starting configuration (8-core CPU, 24 GB RAM, 512 GB storage) priced at $2,599 and shipping on October 16; the company also opened preorders for a Surface RTX Spark Dev Box for $5,999 ahead of November shipping. At the event Microsoft revealed Windows updates under the name “Hybrid Intelligence” that give Copilot access to local files and the ability to take actions across the OS (demonstrated by the Autopilot agent).
At Microsoft's Windows and Surface event, the company demonstrated 'Hybrid Intelligence,' letting Copilot (and Autopilot agents) access files on a PC and perform OS-level actions — for example, finding, renaming, zipping documents and drafting an email. Microsoft said Hybrid Intelligence features will arrive in Copilot over the "next couple months," and also showed a new Windows search experience with quick inline actions coming to Windows 11 this fall.
OpenAI is reopening its $200-per-month Pro subscription to new sign-ups while cutting the amount of API credits granted per dollar by half; the previous 5-hour usage cap for subscribers has been removed. Employee Thibault Sottiaux cited recent releases—GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, reportedly released this week at half the API price of predecessors—and framed the changes as a shift toward pay‑per‑use pricing.
Microsoft is reorganizing the Copilot app into Home, Code, and a new Autopilot agent built on OpenClaw that will run continuously in the cloud and act proactively for businesses; Autopilot enters private preview in late September. The company is also shifting Autopilot, Code and Cowork to usage-based billing while keeping chat and Office integrations under the standard Copilot license, and adding model-routing and FinOps tools to manage costs.
Ando, founded by Sara Du, came out of stealth with a team messaging platform designed to let AI agents have identities, inboxes and participate in channels and calls like humans. The startup said it raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence.
Unredacted material from The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft quotes internal statements saying AI training practices amounted to ‘‘theft’’ and that models are ‘‘substitutive’’ or an ‘‘existential threat’’ to publishers. The filings allege large-scale scraping (including millions of NYT URLs in Common Crawl-derived data), internal projects sharing training datasets (e.g., Project Mango/Taxi and delivery of GPT-3 training data to Microsoft), and Microsoft metrics showing Copilot reduced NYT click-throughs by as much as 93%.
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