Jan 22nd 2025

Windows Weekly 916

Name: ¡Agua Gigante!
Uploaded: 2025-01-22T20:00:00Z
Duration: 2 h 8 min 48 s
Description: OpenAI, Stargate Project, 24H2 Preview

¡Agua Gigante!

OpenAI, Stargate Project, 24H2 Preview

Records live every Wednesday at 2:00pm Eastern / 11:00am Pacific / 19:00 UTC.

Category: News

Microsoft, Google make major changes to how they deliver office productivity AI functionality.

Microsoft was technically first, it made two changes previously: AI credits for Microsoft 365 consumer subscribers across Windows apps, Designer, etc. And it introduced the new plans and price hikes noted below in limited markets.
Google kills Gemini Advanced for businesses, adds those features to Workspace, raises prices.
Microsoft adds limited access to Copilot Plus features for paying Microsoft 365 Family and Personal subscriptions, raises prices.
But there are lots of caveats, questions, and complaints - of course there are.
Price hikes are pretty substantial.
AI credits system with no management.
Only the primary user gets this functionality with Family plan, no way to change that.
No way to get more credits each month.
You can pay $20 per user per month to get Copilot Plus still.
With this, the AI business model has changed yet again. It will keep changing.
All in all, an incredible week of change, but also one I (Paul) asked for last year in Will Not Pay for AI.
Nothing changed with Google consumer AI you still pay for Gemini Advanced and Microsoft commercial AI - you still pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Windows

Windows Insider

Microsoft brings AI-powered Windows Search to Dev channel Copilot+ PC is the minimum.
Windows 11 version 24H2 Release Preview channel update ahead of preview update and then Patch Tuesday in February: Improved Taskbar previews, Windows Studio Effects icon in system tray, Shared items in File Explorer home page/new Shared tab, 6 GHz support for mobile hotspot, non-admins can finally change the time zone, weird Windows Backup change (standard Taskbar on restore on new PC), many fixes.
Last week, new Canary build with Administrator protection (basically the Recall Windows Hello behavior for every admin action).
Last week, two builds - new Beta (23H2) build with widgets extensibility, top cards in Settings app, changes to Home view in Settings app for commercial users, improved text scaling in File Explorer, the Windows Backup change noted above more. And more...
Semi-related but important: Microsoft made a subtle yet massive way to how MSA sign-ins work on the web.

Microsoft and OpenAI change their relationship subtly, OpenAI can now use other cloud infrastructure. Or is the start of something major?
FTC warns on Big Tech AI startups, no one care.
OpenAI announces two new feature for ChatGPT Custom instructions and task (from last week).

Xbox and Gaming

Microsoft Edge Game Assist is now available in stable, but you have to enable it first.
Xbox Game Pass gets a ton of new titles for the second half of January.
Don’t forget: Xbox Developer Direct is Thursday (January 22).
Nintendo finally offers a tease of the larger Switch 2, more in May.

Tips and Picks

Tip of the week: It’s time to figure out an AI strategy
For you, as an individual. My high-level advice: Go free for as long as you can and experiment with everything.
App pick of the week: Opera
The Opera sidebar is getting interesting and offers a mobile-like experience for online services that can reduce tab usage (and thus memory/resource usage, a huge problem with browsers). Plus, check out this fun promotion.
RunAs Radio this week: SQL 2025 and Fabric SQL with Anna Hoffman
Brown liquor pick of the week: Flecha Azul Extra Anejo

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