Cognitive warmup. YouTube wants its users to flag content that is AI generated “slop” (a term that annoys Satya Nadella, particularly). The company says wiping out low-quality generations from YouTube feeds is a priority for 2026.
I’d simply summarise it as this—YouTube asking users to flag AI slop is a very smart way to have 2.7 billion active users to train their AI models for free (and while millions are actually paying YouTube for a Premium subscription). Do tech companies think only AI is intelligent?
ALGORITHM
- Microsoft’s Copilot Realignment
- AI monies, bubbles and ethics
Microsoft’s Copilot realignment
Realignment may be a kind word. I’ll run you through some corporate speak before we get to the proverbial meaning hidden between the lines. Microsoft Corp. now has a new boss for the Copilot division. Jacob Andreou, a former Snap Inc. exec, will now lead the Copilot product for businesses and consumers. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who was in charge of all things Copilot until now, will focus on the company’s own AI model vision.
“We are bringing the Copilot system across commercial and consumer together as one unified effort. This will span four connected pillars: Copilot experience, Copilot platform, Microsoft 365 apps, and AI models. This is how we move from a collection of great products to a truly integrated system, one that is simpler and more powerful for customers,” Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement.
More corporate speak?
“I came to Microsoft with an overriding mission: to create Superintelligence that delivers a transformative, positive impact for millions of people. This requires us to build frontier models, at scale, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” says Mustafa Suleyman, Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI.
Both generous framings. Let me share some numbers for perspective.
- Microsoft 365 now has over 450 million paid commercial seats, yet Microsoft 365 Copilot has converted only 15 million of them so far—that’s ~3.3% penetration, even after more than two years of relentless AI hype. At around $30 per user monthly subscription, that works out to an annualised revenue run rate of about $5.4 billion. In the same quarter, Microsoft reportedly spent $37.5 billion in AI capital expenditure—in a single quarter.
- Recon Analytics’ AI Choice 2026 survey released in February, with a sample size of more than 150,000 users from July 2025 to January 2026, found Copilot’s share among paid AI subscribers fell from 18.8% to 11.5% in six months, with Gemini overtaking it in November 2025. The more damaging trajectory is about distribution versus preference.
- When Copilot is the only Workplace AI option, adoption is fine. But when users can choose between Copilot, ChatGPT and Gemini, only 8% pick Copilot as their primary tool, versus 70% for ChatGPT and 18% for Google Gemini. In other words, Copilot’s biggest strength remains being bundled into Microsoft’s ecosystem, not being the product users actually prefer.
When consumer and enterprise growth is the problem, Microsoft believes an exec with experience in consumer interfaces has a better chance of delivering the numbers. Suleyman, meanwhile, gets the “superintelligence” dream — with no shipped product, and no revenue targets, for now.
AI monies, bubbles and ethics
Microsoft is contemplating legal action over OpenAI and Amazon’s $50 billion cloud deal. The contention here is that Microsoft believes this deal violates their exclusive cloud agreement.
OpenAI’s deal gives Amazon exclusivity for Amazon Web Services as the cloud provider for Frontier, OpenAI’s enterprise platform for building and running AI agents. Microsoft believes this deal is not legal as per their agreement with OpenAI, with their Azure cloud supposed to have that exclusive place.
The two companies may be talking, but there’s a history here which doesn’t paint Sam Altman in good light. Satya Nadella went to war to get Altman back at the helm of OpenAI, after he was fired by the OpenAI board of directors in November 2023.
Absolute pandemonium unfolded in the weeks after, and many other senior execs at the time also left subsequently. Microsoft has invested a total of over $13 billion in OpenAI across multiple funding rounds since 2019. As of October 2025, Microsoft holds a 27% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm, which has been restructured into a public benefit corporation (PBC) named OpenAI Group PBC.
THINKING
I’ll get straight to the point. This is not a thank you. This isn’t gratitude. Look closely, and you’ll find Altman is purposefully using the words “already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took” to undermine software developers, and make large language models look better, more efficient, most capable. It is one more attempt to keep the bubble nicely inflated. The replies to this post on X, really lined him up for the full treatment.
“How are you always so tone deaf with anything you say?”, asks one user. “And thanks to 2015 old coders who used to build everything for us that we use today,” said another. “This has some ‘ill take it from here’ energy that goes unspoken with it,” points out another X user. “Enough gratitude to pay them for their work?”, a pointed question in the replies. And this question really hits hard — “No gratitude for those you stole data, writings, codes from?” The link’s here, in case you want to chime in, and let the AI bro know your thoughts.
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