Microsoft started going down this road nearly 20 years ago, and that research has now yielded what looks like a significant quantum-computing breakthrough. The Majorana 1 chip contains eight qubits, or quantum bits, far fewer than top-tier quantum computers currently in operation.

With the development, Microsoft is raising the stakes in what is set to be the next big technological contest.

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new chip that it said showed quantum computing is "years, not decades" away, joining Google and IBM in predicting that a fundamental change in computing technology is much closer than recently believed.

In a new blog post on Wednesday, Microsoft’s research department debuted a new generative AI model called Muse that it describes as a “breakthrough” for gameplay ideation.

Microsoft debuts Muse, a world and human action model that uses generative AI to put together gameplay snippets.

Despite a decade of AI growth, Cook says, there's no method yet to measure what exactly an AI model has captured and what it has not. Muse is able to provide grainy gifs of one fairly simple video game based on seven years of footage, but it is not a solution for holding everything about a game or every possible outcome of what players could do.