Tech Brew Ride Home - Is Copilot Microsoft's Everything App?

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

Microsoft finally unveiled its Copilot super app, with chat, coding, and agents in one place. Tesla's Optimus ramp hit snags. Meta wanted you making AI games for Instagram. And a startup valued at $200M last week was suddenly talking $10B. Microsoft launches its Copilot "super app", bundling chat, coding, and agents into a single interface, and rebrands its AI assistant Scout as Autopilot (The Verge) Microsoft's new Copilot Code tab, built on GitHub Copilot tech, lets anyone describe a dashboard, workflow, or lightweight app in plain language and build it inside Microsoft 365, no coding required (Windows Central) Sources: Tesla ramped up Optimus production to several hundred units per week but faces hurdles with its hands, automation equipment, and supplier constraints (The Information) Meta unveils mobile app Horizon Create and web app Horizon Studio for building games with AI prompts; the games will run on Facebook, Instagram, and Horizon (The Verge) Sources: Jev developer TypeSafe is in talks to raise $1B+ at a $10B+ valuation; last week the startup announced a $40M seed, PitchBook says at a $200M valuation (The Information) Sources: OpenEvidence, an AI search engine for doctors, raised $250M at a $15B valuation, up from $12B in January; it could be open to selling itself (Business Insider) Longreads The AI build-out is on track to become the biggest economic bet in US history, with $10.3T in data center and AI infrastructure investment projected from 2025 to 2032 (WSJ) Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Welcome to the TechBrew Ride Home for Friday, September 25th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Microsoft finally unveiled its co-pilot super app with chat, coding, and agents all in one place. Tesla's Optimus ramp is hitting snags. Meta wants you to be making AI games for Instagram, and a startup valued at $200 million last week is suddenly talking $10 billion. Oh, and the long reads. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. All right. We got good news. IT pros. Ace of U.S. Uptime is back with new decks you won't want to miss. This online card game made by Eton gives you the chance to battle IT villains and become an IT hero. And now there are three new decks made for Enterprise Data Center and Lone IT Pros. Each one is built for those unique worlds with their own challenges.

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coding and agents. As part of the launch, Microsoft is also rebranding Scout, the AI personal assistant and unveiled at Build earlier this year as autopilot. This new co-pilot app will have three tabs for home, code, and autopilot with home combining co-pilot chat and co-work together. It's the default landing experience for co-pilot users, and Microsoft is also planning to include a Today feature inside it that works as a personalized dashboard for important emails, meeting requests, teams, threads, more. Home is where you get your bearings, keeping you grounded and moving forward. Review recent activity, get suggestions on what co-pilot can help with, and pick up right where you left off work, explains Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at work at Microsoft. The code tab is the

surprise addition to the so-called super app and not one you typically associate with an app design for knowledge workers. It will let anyone create an app tracker, dashboard, or automation, and share the results with colleagues as cloud-hosted internal apps. Powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub co-pilot, code runs in a sandbox environment and can be hosted securely within your tenant, says Spataro. Autopilot is a new addition to the co-pilot experience and one that Spataro describes as a digital teammate, previously called Scout and available initially as a desktop app. Autopilot is the cloud equivalent that enables a personal AI assistant to keep running while you're asleep,

Like many other AI agents, Autopilot has its own cloud computer instance that can be tasked to do things like watch teams channels, run recurring work tasks, or handle follow-ups. The real difference against some other AI agents is that Microsoft has made Autopilot Enterprise grade, appealing to businesses that rely on its office and identity management suites. Autopilot lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer, and workspace, and it's built on Microsoft IQ, so it understands how your organization actually works, says Spataro. it shows up where people already work, Teams, Outlook, chats, channels, and documents. So you can at mention it like a colleague with permissions, audit, and governance behind it. All of this focus on enterprise security and control is a big part of Microsoft trying to sell businesses on co-pilot once again. The difference this time around is that how much a business pays for co-pilot will depend on what their employees are doing. Microsoft is using usage-based billing for the co-work code and autopilot parts of this new copilot.

app. So any long-running agentic capabilities or usage of models like Astra and Fable will be build based on usage. The regular copilot license known as a user subscription license will give you copilot in chat and in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Microsoft is using an auto model picker to match the model for each task, but IT admins will need to use Microsoft's new FinOps for AI to manage AI spend and ensure any agetic usage doesn't get out of control. With this new copilot app, it feels like Microsoft has finally settled on its formula for its AI assistant. The company has redesigned co-pilot plenty of time since its introduction as a chatbot inside Bing, and this latest three-tab design builds on the combination of its two separate consumer and

commercial co-pilot apps last month. That's a long overdue change alongside some big AI leadership shape-ups that help finally appoint a single co-pilot boss for the first time, end quote. And quoting Windows Central. Code is one of the first. of the most interesting additions in my opinion. It uses the same underlying technology as GitHub copilot, but it's designed for anyone who wants to automate something or build a simple app without writing code. Basically, I can describe what I want in plain language and co-pilot creates it inside my Microsoft 365 environment. The result might be a dashboard, a workflow, or a lightweight app that connects live business data. I think this is a smart move for Microsoft because it opens

up automation to people who have never touched a line of code, including myself. Developers still get deep integration with GitHub copilot, but everyday users get a way to create tools that fit their needs. Code runs in a secure sandbox, connects to Microsoft IQ for context, and syncs with the rest of the workspace. Basically, as noted in the event, creating apps via code feels the same as creating and sharing a word document, which is certainly intriguing, end quote. The information has sources who say that Tesla ramped up optimist production to several hundred units per week recently, but is facing hurdles with the robot's hands, automation equipment, and supplier constraints. Quote, last month Tesla produced several hundred robots a week up from a few dozen robots per week during the second quarter when the company was doing small batch testing for production, according to two people familiar with the work. Managers have told staffers the company wants to set up a continuous automated.

production line capable of producing more than a thousand robots a week by the end of the year, the people said. That is still far short of its eventual plan to produce around 20,000 a week. The robots coming off its Fremont California factory line known as Optimus V3 are not the exact version the company plans to sell to customers, the people said. The company is still fine-tuning that version, which will have to meet stricter durability and reliability thresholds before Tesla offers it commercially. The V3 is lighter equipped with more cameras and designed to look more human than earlier versions of the robot, two people familiar with the design said. Most of the robots now being made are being used internally for testing, training, and data

collection, including at Tesla's offices in Palo Alto, California. At its factories, Tesla uses the robots in tightly controlled areas where their movements and tasks can be closely supervised, according to one of the people. In these settings, the robots are programmed for specific tasks, rather than operating as generalized or remotely controlled machines, the person said. In early May, Tesla shut down the Fremont production lines for its Model S and Model X vehicles after the company discontinued the vehicles and began moving some of its factory workers and engineers onto the test line for Optimus, another person familiar with the work said. It also moved dozens of engineers from its Model Y line to help, they said. But as production ramped up, problems began to emerge at several stations on the production line, including the ones that assemble the robots' hands and joints and those that install software. and test its electronics, the equipment that holds parts in place can't line them up precisely every

time. Not only are the optimist production lines new, but the optimist parts are much smaller and have to fit together far more precisely than car parts. The end result is that more robots coming off the line need fixing, the people said. Moreover, some newly developed tooling and automated equipment doesn't always work properly when the line runs fast, one of the people said. One of the most difficult aspects of production has been building optimus's hands so they can be manufactured at scale. Elon Musk has said the hands will have the same dexterity as a humans. The hand and forearm have more than 100 screws and other small components that currently require a worker to assemble manually, one of the people said. It's also proving difficult to make the hand durable enough

for sustained use. Some of its touch sensors have had reliability problems, one of the people said. Tesla has developed a sensing glove containing the hands, touch sensors that can be replaced without requiring replacement of the entire hand, and it plans to incorporate that system into the model next year, the person said. The complexity of the hand design has also contributed to delays and higher cost for the newest version of the robot, according to people familiar with the program. Musk has said Tesla plans to eventually sell optimists to the public at a price point between $20,000 and $30,000.

Tesla is continuing to tweak the design in parallel with construction of the production lines to make sure that the product can be built at scale to people said, end quote. Is your multi-entity management creating more confusion than clarity you need the Intuit ERP, Intuit Enterprise Suite? It's the AI-Native ERP solution that's powerful, painless, and proven. Learn more at intuit.com slash ERP. Teams that struggle to scale aren't falling behind because they're lacking headcount or budget, it's because critical knowledge isn't documented. That's what today's sponsor, Scribe, was built to fix.

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And these captured workflows give your AI agents real context so they can operate on how work actually happens, not guesses. Learn more at scribe.com slash ride home. And mention TechBrew Ride Home for your first month of Scribe Capture free on select plans. That's S-C-R-I-B-E-D-How slash ride home. Meta has unveiled a mobile app called Horizon Create and a web app called Horizon Studio for building games with AI prompts. The games will run on Facebook, Instagram, and Horizon, quoting the verge.

The apps will be available in early access, and interested users can sign up for a wait list. Horizon has struggled as a platform, but meta has a plan to give these new Horizon games significantly more reach. It's going to let publish games made with Horizon Create and Horizon Studio get recommended on Facebook and Instagram, where they will also be playable. Someone scrolling through Instagram can tap a clip of your game and be in a multiplayer session within seconds without needing to download an app or be redirected, meta says. Your game lives natively in the feeds where people already discover content and connect with friends.

Games that are engaging, stable, culturally relevant, and keep players coming back will get more reach, according to the company. The company's announcement comes as Roblox, a similar platform to Horizon that is vastly more popular, is also making a significant push into AI-powered development, including a feature in its mobile app that similarly allows users to generate games with a prompt. Giving people the tools to quickly make those could give people more options for things to play. I'm pretty skeptical that a bunch of AI-generated games will be as engaging as a handcrafted experience, but the games made and create and studios sound as if they'll at least have the elements of video games, unlike Google's Project Genie, which can create brief but empty AI-generated interactive experiences. Both enable creators to turn any idea into a complete 2D or 3D mobile game,

complete with progression systems, balanced difficulty, art direction, multiplayer, and more than refine every element to their standards, Meta says in a blog post, end quote. Sources tell the information that Jev Developer TypeSafe is in talks to raise more than $1 billion at a greater than $10 billion valuation. Here's the thing. TypeSafe came out of stealth just last week by announcing a $40 million seed round, which Pitchbook says was at a $200 million valuation. Again, let me repeat that. Last week, it was valued at $200 million. This week, possibly more than $10 billion. Look, folks, if this were to come to pass, this would, without a doubt, be the fastest fundraising glow up of all time. Quote, Silicon Valley has, a new AI startup to obsess over and throw money at. We're hearing that TypeSafe AI, the startup developing a new kind of model called Jev, has started to talk to investors about raising an enormous round, $1 billion or even more, and that some unnamed investors have offered to put

money in at evaluation of $10 billion or more. All this for a startup that said only last week it had raised $40 million out evaluation, according to pitchbook of $200 million. But the buzz is palpable. On Wednesday at our AI Agenda Live Conference in San Francisco, at least two speakers brought Jev up with pretty glowing terms. Incredibly fast, remarked NVIDIA's senior director of high-performance computing Dion Harris while noting the model's limitations. This buzz may be driving up its compute costs, making it more amenable to another round, a scenario that just played out with the startup behind instinct. TypeSafe was co-founded by former OpenAI researcher Diogo Amieda, former meta-research engineer Sasha Shang, and entrepreneur Eric Gaffney. DCVC led the seed funding.

TypeSafe is part of a group of startups that have emerged with alternative architectures to the one underlying today's large language models. That group also includes core automation, a startup founded by a former OpenAI senior researcher Jerry Turek earlier this year that wants to build models that continue learning after they're trained and Inception, which is building a language-generating model that takes inspiration from a language-generating model that takes inspiration

from AI that creates images. Companies like Core Automation have had no trouble raising money. The startup founded in January has already raised $630 million in funding most recently at a $3.5 billion valuation, including the investment, according to a person with knowledge of the figures.

At the conference Wednesday, Turek said he made the decision to launch his own startup based in part on his assessment that he'd be able to get more compute to fund his experimental research on his own rather than at a larger company, end quote.

Since we're on, interesting raises. Sources tell Business Insider that open evidence, an AI search engine for doctors, has raised $250 million at a $15 billion valuation up from $12 billion back in January. It could be open to selling itself. It could not be verified if the company has M&A interest from possible acquirers, and open evidence may prefer to remain independent. Based in Miami, Open Evidence has raised over $1 billion in the past year from investors including Thrive Capital, DST, GV, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia Capital. The startup has called its AI-powered search engine the fastest growing application for physicians in history.

The new funding round comes as Open AI, Anthroping, and other AI giants make a bigger push into healthcare. Instead of just providing the models that power other companies' products, they're increasingly building healthcare tools of their own. As an acquisition, Open Evidence could offer a shortcut. It already has doctors using its product, experience handling sensitive medical information, and a foothold in a massive market that AI companies increasingly want to own. Founded in 2022, Open Evidence has already become widely used by medical professionals with more than two-thirds of U.S. doctors relying on the AI product for its diagnostic and treatment advice, according to CNBC.

Open Evidence maintains relationships with several of the largest technology companies and counts NVIDIA as an investor. Anthropic announced a partnership with the company this week. Open Evidence integrates with both Google and Microsoft's AI tools, end quote. Only one long read for you this week. It's from the journal. It's official. The AI buildout is now the biggest speculative capital buildout of all time. The AI buildout is on track to become the biggest economic bet in U.S. history,

Dwarfing the investments made to fund other huge U.S. infrastructure projects such as the railroads, the highway system, and the plumbing for the internet. Total investment in data centers and related artificial intelligence infrastructure is projected to total $10.3 trillion from 2025 to 2035 to 2032, according to new estimates by economist Shinvan Nielberg, published by the Brookings Institution. That is a staggering 3.6% of gross domestic product a year on average. has the U.S. economy been so dependent on the buildout of a single industry. AI investment in the U.S. is projected to hit 1.9% of GDP in 26, according to new estimates from Goldman Sachs. The railroad boom of the late 19th century marked the last time the buildout of one new industry accounted for a larger share of the economy, end quote. No bonus episodes for you this weekend. Have a good one.