😺Microsoft's breaking from OpenAI...

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Welcome, humans.

You could look at the state of the software job market as an indicator of what’s to come for the rest of us as AI use spreads.

So far, that means: 1. leaner teams and 2. management being more selective with new hires, leading to 3. a slightly higher unemployment rate of 5.7% (versus the overall 4% rate from January).

And if OpenAI’s planned $10K/month software agents are any indication, that trend could likely accelerate very soon.

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Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Microsoft developed and tested new AI to ween itself off OpenAI.
Apple delayed personalized Siri for another year.
OpenAI launched a model comparison report.
US proposed more AI bills in early 2025 than all of 2024.

Microsoft is about to release its own AI models to rival OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon…

It’s been a minute since we dived into the Microsoft vs OpenAI drama, largely because OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s been busy with a new baby (congrats, Sam!) and a potential eye-popping fundraising round from SoftBank.

The reporters at The Information certainly don’t let that kinda tomfoolery slow them down. They just published a fascinating exclusive about how Microsoft’s “AI CEO”, Mustafa Suleyman, has made significant progress with internal AI models called MAI that supposedly match OpenAI’s models on benchmarks.

Here’s the TL;DR:

Microsoft is swapping out OpenAI models for MAI models in Copilot.
Microsoft will offer MAI to developers directly later this year.
Suleyman said “we are now using, under the hood, essentially all of the models from major labs.”

That last point means Microsoft has tested xAI’s Grok, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama, and DeepSeek’s open source models inside Copilot, too.

The article also spilled some tea on where Suleyman and Altman’s relationship soured—allegedly, when OpenAI wouldn’t reveal how o1’s “thinking” works on a tense phone call.

From that viewpoint, Microsoft’s simply protecting its long term interests here, and hey—wouldn’t you?

Why this matters: There are brands, and there are models, and if you’re a regular person chatting with ChatGPT or Copilot, it doesn’t really matter what model the interface is running as long as it gets the job done.

Currently, the right AI for the job is sorta all over the map, but as far as the LM Arena is concerned, the answer is usually Grok 3, which is now available for anyone to try for free.

You can use it with Think mode, which is Grok’s version of o1’s reasoning method, or with DeepSearch which is Grok’s version of Deep Research. Sounds like you get 15 normal messages, 10 thinking, and 10 DeepSearch questions every 2 hours right now.

However, many people don’t want to support Elon, and therefore will never try Grok (even IF it’s free). So they’ll stick with OpenAI, or Claude, or if they just need AI in their apps when they want it, Copilot or Google’s Gemini.

But what if your Copilot (which you have to use for work) was actually running Gemini, or *~Le Gasp~* Grok, and you had no idea? Would you even notice?

This is the point: AI models are becoming like software—a layer or two deeper than most care to know about. If it’s not true now, GPT-5 will make sure of that.

What really matters is what’s on the surface—the brand, user experience, and how seamlessly it’s distributed where you’ll actually use it.

This becomes truer as AI agents increasingly communicate amongst themselves behind the scenes. Regular users only care if the job gets done, if they enjoyed the experience, and if it will take their job—the forever worry.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

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Julian’s video explains it well. QwQ-32B is a big deal—it’s better than DeepSeek’s R1 (y’know, the AI that broke NVIDIA’s hot streak?), and even outperforms OpenAI’s o1-mini on many tasks, AND you can run it on your computer for freeeee(!!).

The catch? You need a computer that can run it. To see if yours will, use this.

P.S: If you wanna get real nerdy, follow this video for how to run Bolt.DIY (open source version of Bolt.new) locally on your computer to “vibe-code” offline with QwQ for free.

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Around the Horn.

Apple delayed the “more personalized Siri” part of its Apple Intelligence push for at least another year.
OpenAI made a new model page so you can easily compare different models side by side.
US Lawmakers proposed more laws on AI (781 bills) in the first 66 days of 2025 than all of 2024 (743 bills).

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