Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell go over the latest batch of preview updates for January 2025, including KB5050094! The big story of the week revolves around DeepSeek and its noticeable effects on the modern AI world. Sinofsky even wrote a big piece on the latest AI assistant!

Windows 11

• Preview updates for Windows 11, 10 arrive ahead of February Patch Tuesday
• Windows 11 - Taskbar preview improvements, Windows Studio Effects in the system tray, many File Explorer fixes, more
• Windows 10 - New Outlook replaces Mail, Calendar, People
• New Dev and Beta channel builds - Overdue battery icon updates in Dev, Snap Layout experiments in Beta
• New Canary build today with new File Explorer home view tab
• Microsoft to remove Dev Home from Windows - This never made sense, so that's fine, but its most important features will live on
• Microsoft Edge for Windows now has a Scareware blocker in preview

AI

• DeepSeek explodes out of the gate, sends Big Tech/AI stock reeling and opening up questions about how much money these companies are spending on AI
• Nadella, Altman, Nvidia all react to this change in interesting ways
• Steve Sinofsky - This was inevitable, disruption always comes from outside
• Ahead of this blockbuster development, a look at how the Microsoft/OpenAI relationship is changing - and now we need another look
• OpenAI announces Operator agent for ChatGPT in preview
• Google is bringing new Gemini features to Android and Pixel
• Google is also bringing NotebookLM to almost every Workspace tier, including the cheap one I (Paul) use, NotebookLM Plus to WS Standard and better

Microsoft

• Microsoft preps smaller Surface Pro and Laptop models with Snapdragon chips for some reason
• Microsoft is closing its UK-based "experience center"

Xbox

• Thanks to Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is the biggest game publisher in the world
• Phil Spencer: Xbox Series S a "real advantage" for coming portable gaming product
• Phil Spencer says hardware still "critical" to Xbox. More like "critical condition," am I right?
• No surprises at Xbox Developer_Direct, but a solid collection of games, including the new DOOM

Tips and Picks

• Tip of the week: It's time to start watching Dave's Garage
• App pick of the week: PowerToys, now with Zoomit
• RunAs Radio this week: Querying for Breaches with Mark Morowcyznski
• Brown liquor pick of the week: Blair Athol 12 Floral & Fauna

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

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Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

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