Quantum computers, which promise to revolutionise everything from chemistry to cancer research, aren’t quite ready for the mainstream yet – but that hasn’t prevented the emergence of a new breed of quantum software developers.

“Writing a program for a quantum computer used to mean getting a PhD,” says Lov Grover. He would know – his Grover’s algorithm, created in 1996 for searching a database with a quantum computer, was one of the first pieces of quantum software. At that time, there were no quantum computers that could actually run it, and the work…

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant is a powerful tool designed to streamline and enhance your professional productivity. Whether you’re new to AI or a seasoned pro, this guide will help you through the essentials of Copilot, from understanding what it is and how to sign up, to mastering the art of effective prompts and creating stunning images.

Additionally, you’ll learn how to manage your Copilot account to ensure a seamless and efficient user experience. Dive in to unlock the full potential of Microsoft’s Copilot and transform the way you work.

What is Microsoft Copilot?

Copilot is Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant, an advanced large language model. It’s available on the web, through iOS, and Android mobile apps as well as capable of integrating with apps across the company’s 365 app suite, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The AI launched in February 2023 as a replacement for the retired Cortana, Microsoft’s previous digital assistant. It was initially branded as Bing Chat and offered as a built-in feature for Bing and the Edge browser. It was officially rebranded as Copilot in September 2023 and integrated into Windows 11 through a patch in December of that same year.

Copilot runs the Microsoft Prometheus model, which is built from OpenAI’s GPT-4 foundational model. Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI, pledging nearly $13 billion in April 2023. You’ll see a lot of overlap in terms of functionality between ChatGPT and Copilot because of this cozy working relationship between the two companies.

Copilot is available as both a 365 integration, where it can access a user’s data to provide real-time summarization and analysis on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and emails, as well as generate text and images, and as a web- and app-based chatbot. The chatbot is available free to users, though Microsoft offers a variety of subscription packages that provide additional features and capabilities.

For example, free users are only afforded a limited number of chat interactions with the model in a given three-hour period (typically about 80 queries and responses). What’s more, they cannot integrate Copilot into 365 applications at the free level. For a $20/month Copilot Pro plan, users gain greater access to the model, drastically increase the number of chats they can have before timing out, and their text-based requests are kicked up to the front of the inference queue — images even generate faster when using Dall-E and Designer.

In October 2024, Microsoft announced new Vision and Voice Interaction features for the Copilot experience on the Edge browser. Copilot Vision is similar to Microsoft’s ill-fated Recall feature, in that it looks over your shoulder while you surf the internet. It stands perpetually ready to answer questions, provide recommendations, and summarize whatever it is you’re currently looking at. To assuage user concerns, Microsoft has made the feature opt-in, meaning you’ll have to actively turn it on every time you use it, and it will display an onscreen indicator whenever it is active. It also won’t work on paywalled or sensitive content, so your browsing history will remain private and secure.

Voice Interactions, similarly, is Microsoft’s response to ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode and Gemini Live. It enables the user to speak to the AI as though it were a regular conversation with another person, using their voice rather than text inputs. Copilot Voice is currently rolling out to Windows users in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, but only in English. Vision will be released in the U.S. “soon,” according to Microsoft, but will only be made available to Pro subscribers at launch. The company plans to eventually release the feature to more users, though there is no timetable set for that rollout yet.

How to sign up for Copilot

Go to the Copilot website and click the sign-in button in the top right (to the left of the three horizontally stacked lines and to the right of the Get the App! button). Pick whether you’re applying with either a personal account (like Gmail or Proton) or a work/school account (which would have their own domains). At the Microsoft Live sign-in screen, click the “No account? Create one!” link and follow the onscreen instructions.

If you want to upgrade to Pro, sign in/up using the method above. Once you’re on the Copilot home screen, click on the “Try Copilot Pro” radio buttons at the bottom of the screen, just above the context window. Then, again, follow the on-screen instructions and be sure to have a credit card ready. Microsoft will give you the first month of service free but will auto-charge you $20 every following month.

Getting started with Copilot

Once you’re logged in, the Copilot homepage offers a number of features and options. In the upper-left corner, you can switch between the Copilot and Notebook options — the former better used for asking questions and conversing directly with the AI, the latter more often used to collaborate with Copilot on longer written works.

The 32k token context window (that’s the total number of tokens that can be included in a prompt-and-response pair) is located at the bottom of the screen. You can upload documents and images for the chatbot to analyze by clicking the picture icon in the lower right of the context window. The microphone icon to its right allows you you simply speak your query rather than type it in. You can also select how rigid Copilot will be in its responses by selecting among the More Creative, More Balanced, and More Precise style options directly above the context window.

In the top-right corner, you’ll see your user name and avatar. Click on that to either sign out or switch to a different account. To the right of your avatar is the settings menu (the three horizontal stacked lines) where you can adjust various privacy, user, and appearance options.

All the way on the right of the screen are the Chats and Plugins menus. Chats is simply a historical list of things you’ve talked about with the AI previously. Check out the “How to manage your Copilot account” section below for more details. Plugins are essentially API calls that you can apply to a given Copilot chat (up to three at a time). They include Instacart, Kayak, and Klarna, which will leverage those companies’ specialized product information to help Copilot better answer your queries about grocery shopping, travel accommodations, and price matching, respectively.

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How to effectively use prompts in Copilot

How to create images in Copilot

Having Copilot generate images is no different than having it generate written responses. Be sure to be clear in what you’re asking the system for and avoid using subjective terms like “good” or “pretty” (since the AI doesn’t actually understand what those words mean, just how likely they are to appear next in a text string).

So, rather than “draw a picture of a pretty frog playing music at a concert,” try “draw an image of a frog in a top hat and tuxedo playing the violin in a packed concert hall, photorealistic.” The AI will initially return four potential images. You can then pick any one of them to continue further refining (“make its bow tie red”) and reiterating (“remake the image as pixel art”) until you achieve the image output you’re looking for.

How to manage your Copilot account

Copilot controversies

It should go without saying at this point that you shouldn’t implicitly trust what a chatbot tells you. AI have a tendency to “hallucinate” facts and figures in their responses, hallucinations that just got one expert witness in seriously hot water with the courts. The witness, Charles Ranson, ran afoul of New York State Unified Court judge Jonathan Schopf for using Copilot to inaccurately verify his damage calculations in a dispute involving a Bahamas rental property, which was included in the deceased owner’s trust to his son. The case depended, at least in part, on his accurate appraisal.

Schopf found that Ranson’s testimony was “entirely speculative” and did not take into account obvious factors like real estate taxes and the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Ranson was adamant in his testimony that the use of Copilot or other artificial intelligence tools, for drafting expert reports is generally accepted in the field of fiduciary services and represents the future of analysis of fiduciary decisions,” Schopf wrote. “However, he could not name any publications regarding its use or any other sources to confirm that it is a generally accepted methodology.”

If you love Xbox and you love Call of Duty, then you’ll be happy to know that you can show off that love with the newly announced Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 accessories coming for the Xbox platform. Today Microsoft announced that it’s launching a trio of new accessories for fans of the Call of Duty franchise. This includes two different controllers and a wrap for the Xbox Series X. If you own an Xbox Series S, you won’t have any special console customizations available but you can still use either of the two controllers. So let’s mark that down as a win.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launches in a little over a week, so this announcement feels right on time. It also sort of coincides with Activision’s recent announcement about the game’s preload times. If you’re looking to get your hands on anything from this collection, the floodgates are open. At least for some of it.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Xbox accessories are available starting today

You can purchase two of the three new accessories starting today, and these are the two controllers. Microsoft is launching a standard Xbox Wireless Controller and an Elite Series 2 Controller with the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 theme. These are available exclusively from the Xbox Design Lab. So you won’t find them officially from retail partners. This means if you see them outside of the Xbox Design Lab, they’re likely from third-party resellers at a higher price, or they’re fake.

Pricing for the Xbox Wireless Controller starts at $84.98 if you don’t add on any customization options. However, if you take the controller as Microsoft designs it, you’re looking at $98.95. This is because it has customized metallic colors for the triggers and D-Pad. And honestly, it looks better this way. That being said, this is the Design Lab. So you can design it however you want.

If you want to step things up to the Elite Series 2, pricing for the Black Ops 6 version starts at $164.98.

The Xbox Series X console wrap is available for pre-order

While the controllers may be available today, the Xbox Series X console wrap is only available for pre-order. The good news is that it’s available starting October 22, and anyone who pre-orders early enough should get it by October 23. That’s according to the pre-order page on the Microsoft Store.

Newly unsealed grand jury documents revealed that two Sudanese nationals allegedly attempted to launch thousands of distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks on systems across the world. The documents allege that these hacks aimed to cause serious financial and technical harm to government entities and companies and even physical harm in some cases.

(DoJ) unsealed charges against Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer that resulted in federal grand jury indictments. The two are allegedly connected to more than 35,000 DDoS attacks against hundreds of organizations, websites and networks as part of a “hacktivism” scheme as part of the cybercrime group Anonymous Sudan and a for-profit cyberattack service.

Even though Anonymous Sudan claimed to be an activist group, the pair also held some companies and entity’s systems for ransom for rates as high as $1,700 per month.

Both face indictments for their role in the coordinated cyberattacks including one count each of conspiracy to damage protected computers. Ahmed also faces three additional counts of damaging protected computers and could receive a statutory maximum sentence of life in federal prison, according to court records filed last June in the US Central District Court of California.

The brothers’ activities date back to early 2023. The two used a distributed cloud attack tool (DCAT) referred to as “Skynet Botnet” in order to “conduct destructive DDoS attacks and publicly claim credit for them,” according to a DoJ statement. Ahmed posted a message on Anonymous Sudan’s Telegram channel, “The United States must be prepared, it will be a very big attack, like what we did in Israel, we will do in the United States ‘soon.’”

One of the indictments listed 145 “overt acts” on organizations and entities in the US, the European Union, Israel, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Skynet Botnet attacks attempted to disrupt services and networks in airports, software networks and companies including Cloudflare, X, Paypal and Microsoft that in June of last year. The attacks also targeted state and federal government agencies and websites including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Pentagon and the DoJ and even hospitals including one major attack on Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles causing a slowdown of health care services as patients were diverted to other hospitals. The hospital attack led to the hacking charges against Ahmed that carry potential life sentences.

“3 hours+ and still holding,” Ahmed posted on Telegram in February, “they’re trying desperately to fix it but to no avail Bomb our hospitals in Gaza, we shut down yours too, eye for eye…”

FBI special agents gathered evidence of the pair’s illegal activities including logs showing that they sold access to Skynet Botnet to more than 100 customers to carry out attacks against various victims who worked with investigators including Cloudflare, Crowdstrike, Digital Ocean, Google, PayPal and others.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was one of Anonymous Sudan’s victims as part of the hacking-for-hire scheme, according to court records and . AWS security teams worked with FBI cybercrime investigators. Security teams discovered the attacks were coming from “an array of cloud-based servers, many of which were hosted at a US server-hosting provider.” The discovery helped the FBI determine that the Skynet Botnet attacks were coming from a DCAT instead of a botnet that forwarded the DDoS to its victims through cloud-based servers and open proxy resolvers.

Perhaps the group’s most brazen and dangerous attack took place in April of 2023 that targeted Israel’s rocket alert system called Red Alert. The mobile app provides real time updates for missile attacks and security threats. The DDoS attacks attempted to infiltrate some of Red Alert’s Internet domains. Ahmed claimed responsibility for the Red Alert attacks on Telegram along with similar DDoS strikes on Israeli utilities and the Jerusalem Post news website.

“This group’s attacks were callous and brazen — the defendants went so far as to attack hospitals providing emergency and urgent care to patients,” US Attorney Martin Estrada said in a released statement. “My office is committed to safeguarding our nation’s infrastructure and the people who use it, and we will hold cyber criminals accountable for the grave harm they cause.”

CapWay, a Y Combinator-backed fintech that sought to bring financial services to those in so-called “banking deserts,” has been shut down, according to its founder Sheena Allen. 

Allen wrote about it on LinkedIn and confirmed to TechCrunch.

“I am proud of the work we were able to accomplish, but honestly disappointed that we couldn’t complete the mission,” she wrote. “I feel strongly that there is still much work to be done in the financial inclusion space, so it won’t be the last you hear of me in regard to fighting for economic equality.” 

Allen told TechCrunch the company started to wind down last year and waited this long to announce after a possible acquisition fell through. 

Banking deserts are people in communities, often rural, that have no nearby physical bank branch to obtain a checking account. The term is also extended to people who have difficulty going to a bank, such as lower-income, older, or disabled individuals. 

Allen (pictured above) launched CapWay in 2016 after realizing the impact that not having a bank account has on some communities, such as depending on high-interest payday loans or high-fee cash checking services, as CNN reported. 

CapWay’s company planned to address this population by teaching financial literacy and offering online banking solutions. Pitchbook shows the company raised just under $800,000 in funding, from investors including Backstage Capital, Fearless Fund, and Khosla Ventures. It was part of the Summer 2020 cohort of YC, as TechCrunch reported at the time.

Allen told us there were a few reasons why she shut the company down. She cited the fact that the fintech industry took a huge reputational hit after the hacking of Evolve Bank & Trust and the collapse of Synapse, the latter of which saw hundreds of millions of dollars of consumer funds frozen. 

After that, many banks that looked to partner with fintechs required the fintech to have a certain amount of money in the bank. 

“It takes money to play in a highly regulated industry because you can’t control the changes,” Allen said. “You just have to have enough money and time to survive the adjustments.” 

CapWay had to find a new banking partner during this time but needed to raise more money to meet potential partners’ money-on-hand requirements, which it struggled to do. Some investors turned her away by citing that the company lagged too far behind its competitor.

But she also pointed out the challenge that has pained many Black founders this past year. 

“Fundraising itself was down for everyone, but it was and is extremely down for Black founders,” she said. Crunchbase found that Black founders raised only 0.3% of the $79 billion that went to U.S.-based startups in the first half of the year. 

Allen often felt like she was in competition with other Black-founded fintechs for that smaller piece of pie. She wrote in her post that some investors turned her down by telling her that they had already invested in another Black-founded debit card fintech.

“Some investors like to group all Black fintech companies into one box, [even] when we don’t all do or operate the same or have the same target audience,” she told us. “It’s unfortunate, but that was a factor in us being told no a few times.” 

Allen thanked her team and some of her investors in her LinkedIn post, pointing out that there were investors who “still called and not only checked on the business and me as a founder but me as a human.” She also thanked her fellow founders who “listened to me rant and called to simply check on my mental state through this process.” 

But, one failed startup – which is almost a badge of honor in the startup world – has not deterred her from her love of building companies. She still wants to work in the financial inclusion space and is pondering her next startup idea. She’s currently looking at some potential entrepreneur-in-resident opportunities at venture firms. 

“It’s a rough time to wind down your company,” she said. “But I’ve learned there’s beauty in the journey even on cloudy days when things seem dark.”