https://aijourney.space/microsoft/news/ Changes at Microsoft, logged from its own announcements, documentation and price pages, never from another publisher, each with what it means for you. en https://aijourney.space/updates/2026-10-22-modeling-human-behavior-in-the-prisoner-s-dilemma-with-large-language-mo/ 2026-10-22-modeling-human-behavior-in-the-prisoner-s-dilemma-with-large-language-mo Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT What happened. On October 21, 2026, researchers Raina Gao and Tristan Raffo posted a paper comparing five open-source language models, among them Microsoft's Phi Mini MoE Instruct, against published human cooperation data from repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games, running fixed-partner and shuffled-partner trials over 100 rounds measured in 10-round increments. Sources. arXiv paper, Modeling Human Behavior in the Prisoner's Dilemma with Large Language Models, posted October 21, 2026: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23860 (read 22 Oct 2026) Why it matters. For anyone weighing whether a small, freely downloadable model can stand in for a human test subject in a behavioral study, this paper is a caution rather than an endorsement: a lab that swaps a panel of people for a batch of model calls to save time and cost should expect the output to skew toward cooperation, not match it, unless the prompting setup is checked against a known human benchmark first. That gap also bears on anyone building multi-agent systems where one model's degree of cooperativeness with another, shuffled or not, shapes an outcome like negotiation or resource splitting. https://aijourney.space/updates/2026-09-08-gpt-6-astra-brings-more-capable-ai-to-the-workplace/ 2026-09-08-gpt-6-astra-brings-more-capable-ai-to-the-workplace Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT What happened. Microsoft announced on 3 September 2026 that GPT-6 Astra, described in the post as OpenAI's newest frontier model, is generally available to all customers in Microsoft Foundry, with Standard and Provisioned Throughput deployments in Global and US Data Zone geographies and token prices published for short and long context. Sources. Microsoft Azure blog, GPT-6 Astra general availability in Microsoft Foundry, 3 September 2026: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gpt-6-astra-frontier-intelligence-for-work-now-available-in-microsoft-foundry (read 8 Sep 2026) our Microsoft Copilot plans and limits table, which prices Copilot by the seat and never by the token: https://aijourney.space/microsoft/copilot/#plans (read 8 Sep 2026) Why it matters. For anyone reading this as a Copilot story, the practical point is that nothing on the seat bill moves. Our plans and limits table prices Microsoft 365 Personal at $9.99 a month and Premium at $19.99, with agent work capped at 25 tasks a month rather than metered per token. Foundry is the other door, where the meter starts at $10.00 per million input tokens and the governance work is yours. https://aijourney.space/updates/2026-09-08-how-kier-group-s-louisa-finlay-is-using-copilot-to-drive-safety-and-prod/ 2026-09-08-how-kier-group-s-louisa-finlay-is-using-copilot-to-drive-safety-and-prod Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT What happened. Microsoft's Source EMEA newsroom published an account on 2 September 2026 of how Kier Group, a UK construction and infrastructure contractor employing roughly 11,000 people, has adopted Copilot. About 40 percent of colleagues have Microsoft 365 Copilot and the remainder have Teams Premium, and chief operating officer Louisa Finlay credits small peer group prompt sessions rather than webinars for the take-up. Sources. Microsoft Source EMEA feature on Kier Group, 2 September 2026: https://news.microsoft.com/source/emea/features/how-kier-groups-louisa-finlay-is-using-copilot-to-drive-safety-and-productivity-in-the-construction-industry (read 8 Sep 2026) Why it matters. The split estate is the choice worth studying. A minority hold the full Microsoft 365 seat while everyone else gets AI only inside Teams, so a manager with a seat and a colleague without one walk out of the same meeting with different drafting and summarising help. Anyone budgeting a rollout at this size should read that as a standing cost decision rather than a staging post, and should pitch training at what each group can actually reach on the day. https://aijourney.space/updates/2026-09-06-github-copilot-retires-four-models/ 2026-09-06-github-copilot-retires-four-models Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT What happened. On 3 September 2026 GitHub said it will retire Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Kimi K2.7 Code and Claude Opus 4.7 from every GitHub Copilot surface on 2 October 2026, naming Gemini 3.8 Flash, Kimi K3 and Claude Opus 5 as the replacements. The changelog lists Copilot Chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes and code completions as the surfaces affected, and tells Business and Enterprise administrators they may have to enable the replacement models in their own model policies first. Read on 6 September 2026, GitHub's supported-models reference still listed all four as generally available and its retirement-history table still had no row for any of them. Sources. GitHub Copilot changelog, 3 September 2026, where the retiring models and the retirement date are named: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-09-03-upcoming-deprecation-of-selected-github-copilot-models (read 6 Sep 2026) GitHub's supported-models reference, including its model retirement history table: https://docs.github.com/copilot/reference/ai-models/supported-models (read 6 Sep 2026) Why it matters. A suggested replacement is not a like-for-like swap, and our own price table says so in both directions. Gemini 3.5 Flash sits at $1.50 per million input tokens and Gemini 3.8 Flash at $0.75, both checked on 5 September 2026, so that substitution halves the rate for the rest of 2026 only: the $0.75 is promotional and Google's pricing page returns it to $1.50 on 1 January 2027, which leaves the Gemini swap costing what the model it replaced costs today. Kimi K2.7 Code sits at $0.95 and Kimi K3 at $3.00 on the same check, so that one triples it. If Copilot is the only place you meet these models the swap costs you nothing, because the seat price does not itemise them. If you also call them directly, the retirement is a nudge toward a rate card you did not choose, and it is worth pricing your own traffic before 2 October rather than after.