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AI IS MY COPILOT

It’s all about AI agents at Microsoft Build

Microsoft announced new “agentic AI” tools for coding, science, and data at its Build 2025 developer conference.

Jon Keegan

Microsoft announced a bevy of new AI tools at its Build 2025 developer conference in Seattle. The big theme: AI agents are here.

CEO Satya Nadella took the stage for a two-hour presentation outlining the company’s plans for developers. Nadella’s presentation included cameos from some key AI leaders: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Tesla/X/xAI CEO Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang.

Microsoft’s $14 billion partnership with OpenAI was recently reported to be fraying due to tension between Nadella and Altman, but the OpenAI CEO was the very first guest for a live interview, which was a completely cordial talk. Altman discussed OpenAI’s new Codex coding agent and how agents are the future of coding.

Nadella also highlighted updates to Copilot — but that requires some unpacking.

There’s Microsoft Copilot 365, which is an AI agent that lurks in your productivity suite of apps and can help generate PowerPoint slides, summarize Microsoft Teams meetings, or analyze your data.

There are also big updates to Github Copilot, an AI tool that helps software developers generate, test, and debug code, which has evolved from an in-editor AI tool to an “asynchronous coding agent.”

That’s not to be confused with plain old Microsoft Copilot, which is just a ChatGPT-style chatbot.

Also there’s Microsoft Copilot Studio, for building new AI agents, and Copilot Tuning, for fine-tuning your AI agents on your company’s proprietary data. (It seems Microsoft didn’t get our memo on the growing AI naming branding confusion.)

Microsoft’s Azure AI cloud computing platform is adding xAI’s Grok3 models. In a prerecorded interview, Musk waxed nostalgic about his early days working with Windows and how the goal with Grok is “to aspire to truth with minimal error.”

Nadella highlighted that Azure AI Foundry lets developers use models from OpenAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Meta’s “full heard of llama” models.

Microsoft is now embracing Model Context Protocol into its tools, an open standard developed by Anthropic to standardize the way apps interact with different AI models.

Microsoft also announced a new tool to let companies quickly add conversational chatbots to their websites called NLWeb that can pull from a company’s own data.

For the scientific community, the company announced Microsoft Discovery, an AI-powered research platform that is built to help scientists research, develop hypotheses, and test new discoveries.

At one point during Nadella’s presentation, two protestors disrupted the keynote, challenging the company’s cloud computing contracts with the Israeli government. One protestor turned out to be a Microsoft employee who was able to email several thousand coworkers about the protest after being ejected from the theater.

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Rani Molla

After Tesla earnings, prediction markets think unsupervised FSD is less likely than ever to be rolled out this year

Tesla’s unsupervised full self-driving technology, which would autonomously ferry passengers around without a human driver having to pay attention, is supposed to help catapult the electric vehicle company’s valuation further into the stratosphere. It was also supposed to be available this year, but prediction markets participants, as well as former Tesla self-driving leaders, no longer think that will happen.

On Tesla’s earnings call this week, CEO Elon Musk said the company now had “clarity” on achieving unsupervised full self-driving — something he’s repeatedly said would be available at least in some markets this year.

The comments seemed to give Polymarket prediction markets participants some clarity. There, the market-implied probability that Tesla will release unsupervised FSD this year reached its lowest point since the event contract was opened in May.

The odds of it happening had been pretty high up until late June, when Tesla’s long-awaited robotaxi launched with a safety driver in the passenger seat. The unsupervised FSD event contract specifies the feature can have “no requirement for human intervention.”

tech
Rani Molla

Banks prepare record $38 billion debt financing to fund Oracle-tied data centers

Banks led by JPMorgan and Mitsubishi UFJ are preparing a $38 billion debt offering to fund two Oracle-tied data centers in Texas and Wisconsin, Bloomberg reports. The projects, developed by Vantage Data Centers, will support Oracle’s $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure push with OpenAI and Nvidia.

The loans — $23.25 billion for Texas and $14.75 billion for Wisconsin — are expected to mature in four years, price about 2.5 percentage points higher than the benchmark rate, and mark the largest AI infrastructure financing to date.

Oracle executives recently said that the company anticipates cloud gross margins will reach 35% and that it expects to see $166 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue by FY 2030.

Oracle is up 1.5% premarket.

Record $38 Billion Debt Sale Nears for Oracle-Tied Data Centers

Record $38 Billion Debt Sale Nears for Oracle-Tied Data Centers

The loans — $23.25 billion for Texas and $14.75 billion for Wisconsin — are expected to mature in four years, price about 2.5 percentage points higher than the benchmark rate, and mark the largest AI infrastructure financing to date.

Oracle executives recently said that the company anticipates cloud gross margins will reach 35% and that it expects to see $166 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue by FY 2030.

Oracle is up 1.5% premarket.

tech
Rani Molla

Google rises on official announcement of Anthropic deal worth “tens of billions”

Google has made its deal to expand AI compute to Anthropic, reported earlier this week by Bloomberg, official. In order to train and serve its Claude model, Anthropic has agreed to pay Google Cloud “tens of billions of dollars” to access up to 1 million tensor processing units, or TPUs, as well as other cloud services.

Google, of course, has a 14% stake in Anthropic, making this one of the many circular AI deals happening at the moment.

“Anthropic and Google have a longstanding partnership and this latest expansion will help us continue to grow the compute we need to define the frontier of AI,” Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said in the press release. “Our customers — from Fortune 500 companies to AI-native startups — depend on Claude for their most important work, and this expanded capacity ensures we can meet our exponentially growing demand while keeping our models at the cutting edge of the industry.”

The announcement has sent Google up again, more than 1% premarket.

tech
Rani Molla

Report: Snap seeking $1 billion to finance its AR glasses division in “existential” fundraise

Snap is down more than 1% this morning following news that the company is attempting to raise $1 billion for its AR glasses unit in what someone told Sources.news was an “existential” fundraise.

A Snap spokesperson countered, “We do not need to raise money to execute against our plans to publicly launch Specs in 2026, but remain open to opportunities that could accelerate our growth.”

Multiple investors are involved in the talks, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, according to Sources.news. The report also noted that Snap plans to turn the unit that makes its Specs glasses into an independent subsidiary à la Google’s Waymo “that can continue raising capital from investors.”

Snap plans to produce about 100,000 units of next year’s Specs, pricing them around $2,500.

The beleaguered stock saw quite a bit of retail interest last month, amid r/WallStreetBets chatter that its low nominal price made it a potential acquisition target.

Snap eyes $1 billion fundraise for AR glasses

Snap eyes $1 billion fundraise for AR glasses

Multiple investors are involved in the talks, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, according to Sources.news. The report also noted that Snap plans to turn the unit that makes its Specs glasses into an independent subsidiary à la Google’s Waymo “that can continue raising capital from investors.”

Snap plans to produce about 100,000 units of next year’s Specs, pricing them around $2,500.

The beleaguered stock saw quite a bit of retail interest last month, amid r/WallStreetBets chatter that its low nominal price made it a potential acquisition target.

Rani Molla
10/23/25
After a record quarter, analysts point out that Tesla’s car sales don’t really matter anymore

Tell that to Apple and its iPhone.

New Tesla Model 3 With Full Self-Driving Activated

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