Microsoft announced a bunch of new in-house AI models at Build 2026, including a new "flagship" model: MAI-Thinking-1. It's an ambitious step into model development for Microsoft, which introduced its initial in-house models last year - before then, it had relied on OpenAI's models. The two companies recently renegotiated their deal to loosen ties.
According to Microsoft, MAI-Thinking-1 is a "medium-sized model" that "matches leading models" on "key" software engineering benchmarks. Microsoft says the company "trained it from the ground up on clean data, without distillation from third-party models."
As for other models announced today, t …
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Microsoft just kicked off Build 2026 with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella and other company leaders. As expected, it was filled with announcements, ranging from new Surface hardware to an always-on personal assistant and updates across Microsoft's in-house AI models.
If you didn't watch the event live, you can catch up on all the latest news in the roundup below.
A mini Surface PC designed for AI development
The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is geared toward developers who want to run local AI models on their device, serving as a substitute for Qualcomm's canceled dev kit. It comes equipped with Nvidia's new Arm-based Spark RTX chip and 128G …
Read the full story at The Verge.
Microsoft on Tuesday took the wraps off Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing, an open-source framework for spinning up AI evaluations.
The agentic AI moment has arrived, but delivering on its promise requires more than good models. It also takes fast hardware, secure runtimes, a responsive data layer and models tuned for long-running reasoning. NVIDIA and Microsoft are bringing that full stack to developers across Windows devices, Azure cloud and local deployments. At Microsoft Build, NVIDIA […]
Microsoft has developed a new AI agent that can run autonomously around the clock to complete tasks across Microsoft 365 applications.
Microsoft Scout, unveiled at the company’s Build event Tuesday, is a new type of always-on agent based on the OpenClaw agent framework that Microsoft calls “autopilots.”
These act on a user’s behalf with their own governed Entra identity, Omar Shahine, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said in a blog post.
“Autopilots stay active in the background, understand how work gets done across your apps and systems, and take action without needing to be prompted each time,” said Shahine, a Microsoft veteran who recently announced he is leading a new team to bring OpenClaw-based personal assistants to Microsoft 365 apps.
Microsoft Scout connects to apps such as Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint, and accesses data from chat, email, calendar, and contacts. Accessed via Teams, it can also interact with a user’s browser and with external apps via model co
