Major product announcements this week from Microsoft and Google show how determined both tech giants are to build generative AI into the heart of their computing worlds.

Why it matters: Tech's giants see AI as both a new competitive race and a chance to breathe new life into the central franchises that drive their businesses — like Microsoft Windows and Google Search.

Driving the news: Microsoft has been adding AI assistants to apps and products all year. But at a fall event Thursday, the company announced a new plan to unify all of them into a single Microsoft Copilot that will use knowledge from across apps and data sources and have both work and consumer uses.

• In a new update to Windows 11 available next week, Microsoft is adding its Windows Copilot, bringing Dall-E 3 to Bing and adding AI features to apps such as Paint, Photos and its screenshot tool.
• Windows will also use AI to simplify a range of tasks such as backing up a computer and moving to a new machine.

Google, meanwhile, has been on its own sprint to incorporate AI across its products.

• This week, Google announced improvements to its Bard chatbot designed to help it offer more reliable answers.
• That's crucial for the company, which has built its whole business around providing trustworthy information and knows it can't use conversational AI to answer users' questions unless it tames the technology's tendency to "hallucinate" (make stuff up).
• The changes to Bard also allow users to connect the chatbot to their troves of Google data, including their Gmail archives and Google Docs files.

On Thursday, Google also showed off a bunch of new features that tap AI to make video editing and publishing easier for YouTube creators.

• One of these, Aloud, lets moviemakers dub their work into another language with just a single click within YouTube Studio.
• Those announcements follow a July reorganization of the team that builds Google Assistant, first reported by Axios, designed to remake the tool for the era of generative AI.

The big picture: For many years, choosing a computing platform meant picking between desktop operating systems (Mac or PC), browsers or mobile platforms (iOS or Android).

• AI is changing that equation, providing an entirely new set of comparison points for users to consider in picking their digital tools.
• By helping users accomplish tasks with plain-English questions and commands, AI is giving Microsoft and Google a chance to fundamentally reimagine what their core products can do for users.

State of play: For Microsoft in general, and Windows in particular, it's particularly advantageous that the generative revolution is occurring now, rather than a decade or two earlier.

• In that time, Microsoft has quietly built up a range of technology assets beyond its desktop franchises — from its OpenAI partnership to its cloud computing prowess with Azure.
• Perhaps just as important, Microsoft is finally far enough removed from its epic antitrust battles that it is willing — and seemingly able — to integrate significant new capabilities into Windows without raising regulatory alarms.

Be smart: Integrating Microsoft's various Copilots into a more unified meta-assistant will take time. Microsoft's Thursday announcements declared its long-term intent while outlining the initial steps it is taking with Windows 11.

• The fragmentation of the technology so far — with separate AI features in separate products —is a result of how fast it has been evolving, Aaron Woodman, Microsoft's vice president of Windows marketing, told Axios.
• "The next logical step is convergence," Woodman said.

Missing in action in this competition, for now, is Apple.

• The iPhone's market dominance means that OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and others will surely bring their tools onto Apple's turf. But Apple has been extremely cautious about adding features to its own systems and services based on the latest generative AI technology.
• Dictation and autocomplete did get a boost from the underlying transformer technology in iOS 17.
• And the company is said to be internally testing its own GPT-like engine, per Bloomberg.

"We view AI as huge and will continue weaving it into our products on a very thoughtful basis," Apple CEO Tim Cook said during an earnings conference call last month.

• While talking about its potential — and acknowledging Apple is investing heavily in research — Cook added a note of caution. "I do think it's very important to be deliberative and thoughtful," he said. "There's a number of issues that need to be sorted."

The organizers of a high-profile open letter last March calling for a "pause" in work on advanced artificial intelligence lost that battle, but they could be winning a longer-term fight to persuade the world to slow AI down, Axios' Ryan Heath reports.

The big picture: Almost exactly six months after the Future of Life Institute's letter — signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and more than 1,000 others — called for a six-month moratorium on advanced AI, the work is still charging ahead. But the ensuing massive debate deepened public unease with the technology.

• The letter helped normalize expressing deep AI fears. Voters began to repeatedly express concern to pollsters, the White House mobilized tech CEOs to make safety commitments, and foreign regulators from Europe to China raced to finish AI regulations.

Between the lines: In recent months, the AI conversation around the world has intensely focused on the social, political and economic risks associated with generative AI, and voters have been vocal in telling pollsters about their AI concerns.

Driving the news: The British government is gathering a who's who of deep thinkers on AI safety at a global summit Nov. 1-2. The event is "aimed specifically at frontier AI," U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden told a conference in Washington on Thursday afternoon.

• OpenAI, Meta and regulators have typically used the term "frontier AI" to distinguish the largest and potentially riskiest AI models from less capable technologies.
• "You can never in one summit change the world, but you can take a step forward" and "create an institutional framework" for AI safety, Dowden said.

What they're saying: Anthony Aguirre, the executive director of the Future of Life Institute who organized the "pause" letter, told Axios in an interview that he's "pretty hopeful" the U.K. process is now the best bet for "slowing down" AI development — a subtle reframing of his original "six-month pause" goal.

• Aguirre thinks it's "absolutely critical" that China play a leading role in the U.K. summit, and points to China's approval process for many AI products as proof that governments can slow down the release of AI if they want to.

The other side: Inflection AI co-founder Reid Hoffman believes that whatever public attention the letter may have generated, the authors undermined their credibility with the AI developer community — which they will need to achieve their aims.

• The letter authors were "virtue signaling," Hoffman told Axios. "It hurts the cause."

Flashback: The original letter described a "dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models" and urged AI labs to draw a line at the then recently released GPT-4, hinting that AI might one day destroy humanity.

• But another camp of AI critics insisted that letter signatories were guilty of AI hype — inflating the capabilities of the current generation of large language models.

• Amazon is limiting authors to uploading three e-books per day in an effort to combat a flood of AI-generated submissions. (Ars Technica)
• In a shift, Meta will allow Facebook users to have multiple profiles, though they will still need to be tied to a single account using one's real identity. (The Verge)
• Former ByteDance employees say that TikTok's owner fired them after they complained about racial discrimination. (Axios)

I'll take this cat over an AI artist any day.