I can’t remember the last time Microsoft kicked off a Build keynote with Windows front and center, but that’s exactly what CEO Satya Nadella did this week. Nadella didn’t address the issues Microsoft is trying to fix in Windows 11 but chose to woo the audience with Microsoft’s slick Surface RTX Spark Dev Kit instead, calling it a “dream machine.” Nadella unveiled the new Surface hardware just days after Nvidia officially returned to Windows on Arm with its new RTX Spark chips. Both companies are talking up these chips as some kind of new beginning for PCs, and it’s clear that RTX Spark will drive local AI workloads in a way that Microsoft’s previous Copilot Plus PCs haven’t yet managed. Build really drove home that message this week, with Windows positioned as an all-important part of Microsoft’s AI agent efforts. Microsoft’s original mission under Bill Gates was a computer on every desk and in every home, and Nadella reframed that as “unmetered intelligence on every desk and in every home” within a few minutes of his keynote beginning. It set the stage for Microsoft and Nvidia to position their new Windows PCs as a potential solution for costly, usage-based pricing of cloud-based AI models. As local compute grows in capability, there’s a clear gap that Microsoft and Nvidia can fill with powerful hardware you actually own. “I think we, as Microsoft, have the responsibility for building the best possible AI stack that we can on [Windows], and obviously drive the best AI stack that we can in the cloud,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with Notepad. Davuluri thinks that Microsoft is in a good position to capitalize on hybrid compute, where chips like the RTX Spark will handle a lot of local workloads and intelligently hand off to the cloud when they need something more powerful. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is even more bullish about local AI compute. He wants to turn PCs into devices that work for you, eliminating that idle time when PCs are switched off or you’re not using them. “In the future, if I need my laptop to do something, I just text it with WhatsApp,” said Huang earlier this week. “You don’t want to necessarily run everything in the cloud, because if you can run it locally, it’s free.” Nadella seems to agree. “The amount of compute that there is at the edge is astounding,” he said during his Build keynote. “Every PC, if you sort of aggregate that, that’s a lot of compute power.” That power is really on display with Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chips, which will come to a variety of creator-focused laptops and miniature PCs later this year. RTX Spark is capable of running a 120 billion parameter large language model locally, allowing many AI workloads to run without ever touching the cloud. That’s an appealing concept during a continued AI money squeeze for developers and consumers. Microsoft is targeting its own Surface Laptop Ultra at developers and creators and pairing it with ongoing improvements to Windows 11 performance and developer-friendly additions. While Microsoft’s deeper embrace of Linux utilities inside Windows this week didn’t generate the same gleeful audience reaction as the Windows Terminal announcement in 2019, developers I’ve spoken to are excited by the Coreutils and WSL containers additions. The Surface Laptop Ultra has also been generating some buzz, particularly among developers and power users. Microsoft isn’t quite positioning this as a mainstream premium laptop, but there’s certainly room for it to appeal far beyond developers. “I think you’ll see us do well when it comes to STEM applications, and CAD apps running on the platform, because they take advantage of the same characteristic patterns of high-performance compute,” explains Davuluri. All of this renewed focus on Windows at Microsoft seemed impossible only six months ago. Davuluri responded to the pressure on Microsoft to improve Windows 11 by laying out a plan to focus on performance, reliability, and overall experiences in the OS just a couple of months ago. I got to see some of the performance improvements at Build this week, with side-by-side comparisons of the Start menu and taskbar loading faster. Microsoft is putting in a lot of effort to turn Windows 11 around and listen to feedback from a variety of users. But I’ve been wondering why Microsoft doesn’t just jump to Windows 12. It seems easier to just admit defeat on Windows 11 and then position Windows 12 as the remedy. Microsoft has done this many times in the past, particularly with the releases of Windows 7 and Windows 10. “There are a lot of considerations when you think about the versioning of an operating system itself, and I think for us, a lot of the core proposition with Windows 11, or quite frankly, with Windows 12, or any label we use, has to do with end users and how they use the product and the workflow that they’re in,” says Davuluri. “I think we are more focused on having the product experience be better in the context they’re using it, and that I think is the most important thing for us.” While we might not be getting a Windows 12 anytime soon, I’m curious how this Windows exists in a world of AI agents. Microsoft has been clear that it sees Windows as a home for AI agents and workloads, but it also unveiled Project Solara this week, a new platform for agent-first devices. Microsoft demonstrated a smart employee key card that could run an agent capable of transcribing and recognizing real world objects, and it also showed a reference design for an Amazon Echo Show–like device with an AI agent. It’s clear that Microsoft wants to offer up a platform for dedicated AI devices of the future The big surprise is that Project Solara devices are powered by a version of Android, not Windows. Despite this, Davuluri expects to see Project Solara running on Windows devices too. “We are not hard bound to a device specific operating system,” says Davuluri. “You should imagine a world where Solara will be great on a bunch of platforms, including Windows, both Windows 11 locally and Windows 365 instances in the cloud.” Whether the future of AI agents runs on Windows, Android, or something else may not ultimately matter right now. For the first time in years, Microsoft seems determined to make Windows central to that conversation either way. Build 2026 wasn’t about fixing Windows’ past problems, it was about convincing developers that Windows still has a significant role to play in AI’s future. The pad Microsoft and OpenAI broke up — now they’re ready to fight. Microsoft announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives at Build this week. MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft’s first reasoning model, was the main addition, along with six other new models focused on image, voice, transcription, and coding. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told me these models are part of a bigger effort to prove that Microsoft can become a top AI model creator. A first look at Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface Dev Box. I got a chance to take a closer look at both the Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at Build this week. Microsoft laid on a miniature showcase, demonstrating just how bright the Laptop Ultra screen is, as well as the power of Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip. As is tradition at any Surface event, there was also a full breakdown of the components inside the Laptop Ultra. It’s impressive how much attention to detail there is inside, alongside the focus on repairability. Microsoft’s next-gen quantum chip cuts timeline to useful quantum computing. Microsoft unveiled its latest Majorana 2 chip this week, which uses a new material stack that promises quantum computing much sooner. Microsoft is claiming that by switching from aluminum to lead it has improved the performance of qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing much like the binary bits that computers use today. Physicists were skeptical of Microsoft’s first claims with Majorana 1, so some are once again questioning the company’s target of useful quantum computing by 2029. Microsoft Scout is a new AI personal assistant built on OpenClaw. Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more. Microsoft is releasing a preview version of Scout in the form of a desktop app, but eventually the plan is to have a full Scout cloud service. Microsoft could be the next Big Tech antitrust target. Microsoft has escaped antitrust action in the US for 25 years, but that might change soon. New civil investigative demands reveal that the Federal Trade Commission is looking at potentially exclusionary behavior around Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, as well as its role in the AI industry. Customers have complained that Microsoft’s 2019 changes to its licensing terms made it significantly more costly to run Windows software on infrastructure outside of Microsoft’s own Azure cloud service. The US isn’t the only country probing this issue. The European Commission, UK Competition and Markets Authority, and Japan Fair Trade Commission have been investigating Microsoft’s cloud services within the last year.

Source: The Verge

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