Microsoft’s artificial intelligence is taking no prisoners. This currently most rapidly developing technology is reaching all departments and products of the Redmond giant, including the Xbox. The company has announced a new generative AI model called Muse, which is being promoted as a breakthrough for game developers. According to the manufacturer, it is the world’s first model of its kind and is expected to help gaming studios quickly bring ideas to life with AI.
Muse AI is the first representative of the World and Human Action Model (WHAM) genre. What makes Muse groundbreaking is its detailed understanding of the three-dimensional game world, including game physics and how the game reacts to human controller actions, says Fatima Kardar, CVP of AI Infrastructure at Microsoft. This allows the model to create consistent and varied gameplay rendered by AI, demonstrating a major step forward toward generative AI models that can assist game developers.
The studio was also involved in the development of this model Ninja Theory using its older title Bleeding Edge as a testing ground. Using data from human gameplay, Muse is now able to generate virtual gameplay that resembles the original title, including maps, unique characters or special moves. The output resolution is still extremely low, with gameplay rendering at 10 FPS. However, these are just the first steps of the program, so it should get better with time.
While it’s still early, research on this model is already pushing the boundary of what we thought was possible, Kardar adds. We are already using Muse to develop a playable real-time AI model, trained on our other games. We see the potential of this work to one day benefit both players and game developers.
Microsoft and its Xbox division are also looking at this from the perspective of preserving and fixing games. AI technology based on Muse may in the future allow gamers to generate and experience classic titles with modernized elements without having to rely on backward compatibility on modern hardware. However, it will likely take years to get to that stage.
GPT chat already has 400million (!!!) weekly users
OpenAI reports that ChatGPT, currently the world’s most famous chatbot, already has 400 million weekly users. The service was launched at the end of 2022, and its popularity continues to grow. A sizable share of this is due to new features, better models, and the ability to search the Internet, in which ChatGPT is replacing Google for many.
According to Brad Lightcap, CIOO at OpenAI, ChatGPT is already used by 400 million people per week. This represents a 33% increase in visitors since December 2024, when 300 million users were recorded. This fact was also somewhat mysteriously noted by the company on the X (formerly Twitter) platform, where it only wrote “4e8 ๐ซ”, which in scientific notation simply means 400 million.
In an interview with CNBC, a company representative said ChatGPT owes its growth to the “natural evolution” of the product as more and more people find everyday uses for it. Chatbot AI is also gaining recognition among a wider audience, often through whisper marketing.
People hear about it from others. They see it as a tool. They see their friends using it. There is a general effect of people really wanting these tools and seeing that these tools are really valuable. – Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer at OpenAI
OpenAI is doing better not only in terms of the number of users, but also as a service provider for the enterprise sector. OpenAI’s number of paid enterprise customers has doubled to 2 million as of September 2024. Employees who use AI in their private lives tend to recommend it for commercial applications at work, which is contributing to its growth.
The company also noted an increase in the level of developer engagement. It has doubled in the past six months. Among developers, there has also been a fivefold increase in the use of OpenAI’s inference models, such as o1 and o3. OpenAI’s main corporate customers are Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna and T-Mobile.
Despite these successes, OpenAI has to constantly race against rivals who often release models with greater capabilities. We are referring to the recent achievements of DeepSeek and xAI, which recently released a model of the Grok 3.
Copilot in Excel already allows you to search and import data
Data analysis is an important responsibility for many employees, although it can present difficulties. It can be a challenge both to create and prepare data, and to draw conclusions from it and conduct deeper analysis. Copilot in Excel can help with this. Its new feature allows you to refer to documents Office/Microsoft 365 and other files to streamline the entire process. How it works.
The new functionality allows Copilot in Excel tap into data from Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, as well as PDF files, to make the process of building data collections and analyzing them faster, easier and more intuitive. Searching and importing data will work great for collecting information such as:
- Content from the Internet: you can seamlessly search the Internet from within Copilot in Excel to find information, such as dates or statistics, without getting out of your work rhythm. For example, you can search for a list of countries and their exchange rates, and then easily paste this information into a table.
- Internal content: you can ask Copilot in Excel for data from inside your Microsoft 365 lease, such as a list of announcements from a newsletter you create in Word. It will create a response with the list, which you can paste into an Excel sheet.
- Organizational information: you can ask Copilot for a list of employees who report to a specific manager in the structure, and put this data in the sheet.
- Data from another Excel file: this is one of the most awaited features. While it is possible with Power Query, it takes time and knowledge, not to mention that searching for the right file can be frustrating. Now you can ask Copilot to help you find and import a table from another file, using ordinary, everyday language. Describe the data you need, and the AI assistant will do the rest. For example, you can say you want to add budget details from another Excel workbook to a sales team workbook, and Copilot will help import them. Since this is handled by Power Query, it uses precise data from your organization’s sources in the form of a refreshable call. So when the data is updated in the budget file, the data in the sales team table will also change.
For now, importing refreshable data only works in Excel table files stored in your SharePoint or OneDrive. Addressing workbook data and requesting external data at the same time is not yet fully supported.
This functionality is now available to Microsoft 365 Insiders in the Beta Channel on Windows (version 2503, build 17729.20000) and Mac (version 16.87, build 24053110). The required Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
Grok 3 overtakes GPT-4o, and X Premium gets more expensive
xAI has officially launched Grok 3, a new artificial intelligence model promoted as “the smartest AI in the world.” These words are backed up by test results, in which Grok 3 performs similarly, and often even better, than leading models such as GPT-4o from OpenAI and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking from Google.
The new AI model has been trained on more than 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, which have delivered 200 million GPU hours, 10 times more than during Grok 2 training. Musk’s latest baby is ahead of the GPT-4o in a number of benchmarks, including AIME (math questions) and GPQA (PhD-level physics, biology and chemistry questions). It also scores favorably in the Chatbot Arena, a croudsourcing test. The Grok 3 inference model also outperformed rivals in the AIME 2024 exam, and even a smaller version of the new AIME 2025.
Grok 3 is equipped with an inference model that “thinks” before providing an answer, to provide a more accurate answer. Users can use its “big brain” mode for even more difficult questions in math, science and coding, for which it is tailored, according to the manufacturer. This inference model is also linked to DeepSearch, which, according to its name, scans the Internet to provide detailed answers to questions. In addition, a Grok 3 mini is available, which will perform better in scenarios where one cares about response time.
Grok 3 will initially be available to X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue) subscribers, whose price has almost doubled. The subscription now costs $40 per month or $395 per year, a much higher price than before ($22, or $16 per month until December 2024). Other features will go into the upcoming SuperGrok subscription, which will include inference capabilities, DeepSearch queries and unlimited AI image generation. Elon Musk announced that Grok 3 will also receive a voice mode soon, with models coming to the xAI API in the coming weeks.
An operator from OpenAI is heading to Europe. What can an AI agent do?
Last month OpenAI has introduced an AI agent called “Operator.” designed to perform tasks in the browser on behalf of the user. Unlike ChatGPT, the agent can book tickets, navigate websites, book hotels, fill out forms and more.
All this functionality is still waiting to be opened to the world. Until now, Operator has only been available to customers of ChatGPT Pro in the US. OpenAI meanwhile announced on Twitter/X that Operator has been released in more countries. The Agent can already be used by ChatGPT Pro users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and the UK, as well as most countries where ChatGPT is available. We, however, still do not have access to it.
We are still working on making the Operator available in the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland – we’ll keep you posted! – OpenAI
Such wide availability of AI agent may suggest that the Operator will come to Poland and other European Union countries quite soon. However, it will not be cheap fun. A subscription to ChatGPT Pro currently costs $200, or nearly $800 per month. However, the company plans to expand the agent’s availability to ChatGPT Plus, Team and Enterprise, and in the future integrate its capabilities (perhaps just some) into ChatGPT itself.
Recall that Operator is not only a tool for automating tasks. Its artificial intelligence has been trained to transfer control to the user when needed. This ensures that the AI assistant won’t do everything automatically and cause unwanted trouble. This would be very undesirable when it comes to handling payments or sharing sensitive information.
