Microsoft puts xAI's Grok inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint
A rival model is now living inside Microsoft's own productivity suite, consumer GPUs are being vacuumed up by AI builders, and a former Apple researcher raised $50 million to make AI avatars stop staring at you blankly.
Microsoft has added Grok as a model option in Copilot for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The announcement went up on the Copilot blog on September 12 and widened this week: Grok — sold to enterprise admins under the name SpaceXAI, the corporate identity xAI took after SpaceX absorbed it in February — arrives through Microsoft's Frontier preview program, off by default and gated behind an admin toggle. The fine print is the story: choosing Grok sends prompts and documents outside Microsoft-managed environments, Microsoft's data-residency, audit and copyright commitments stop applying and xAI's enterprise terms take over, and the preview is blocked outright in the EU, EFTA and the UK. Microsoft also hasn't said which Grok version powers it, though we covered the current one's benchmark debut in August — Grok 4.6 matches GPT-5.6 Sol on the intelligence index. Copilot is becoming a switchboard rather than an OpenAI storefront, and the quiet European lockout tells you which regulator Microsoft isn't keen to argue with.
Nvidia's RTX 5090 has evaporated from US online retail, with third-party sellers asking up to $9,500. Micro Center is the lone exception, still selling around $4,299 in store — its in-person-only model insulates it from online buyouts. The demand isn't gamers: the card's GB202 chip and 32GB of GDDR7 make it the cheapest way into serious local inference, since the same GPU in workstation form (the RTX Pro 5000, with fewer shaders and lower bandwidth) lists for $7,000 to $9,000. When a consumer graphics card starts looking like a budget AI server, the shortage stops being a supply glitch and becomes a bidding war between players — and gamers keep losing it.
Nuance Labs raised a $50 million Series A led by Lightspeed to fix the dead-eyed stare of AI avatars. The Seattle startup, founded by former Apple AI researcher Yiwen Ma, is building a single full-duplex model that takes in audio and video and streams both back, instead of the usual duct-taped pipeline of speech-to-text, LLM, text-to-speech and face animation. That means the avatar reacts — nods, reads your tone, follows your gaze — while you're still talking, not after your turn ends. Nvidia and Define Ventures joined returning investors Accel and South Park Commons; a public research preview is slated for later this year, with sales training, coaching and customer service as the first targets. The bet: conversational timing, not voice quality, is what makes synthetic humans feel fake.
What to watch: whether Grok in Office expands beyond the Frontier preview — or stays a US-only demo until someone in Brussels asks why.
If Copilot becomes a model mall, does your company's data leaving Microsoft's walls change what you'd agree to? Tell us in the comments.
