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Microsoft Build
00:19:32
Microsoft dominated Build with Scout, an always-on Teams agent, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, its first reasoning model MAI-Thinking-1 aimed squarely at Anthropic, and Project Solara for agent-first devices. Trump signed a scaled-back AI executive order on cybersecurity.
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Welcome to the Tech We Write Home for Wednesday, June 3, 2026 I'm Brian McCullough today, everything from Microsoft Build, including an Always on Teams agent, the Surface RTX Spark Dev box, Microsoft's first reasoning model, and Project Solara for Agent first devices. Also, the President signed a scaled back AI Executive Order on cybersecurity. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Today's episode is brought to you by Doppel Social Engineering attacks don't bother to knock. They slip right into your inbox phone or on websites instead, pretending to be a harmless internal email or a normal text message until it's too late. Doppel sees right through the disguise. Their AI native platform trains your team to recognize threats like deepfakes, bad links and impersonation attempts before they can actually cause any damage. Doppel strengthens team resilience by giving employees the tools and defenses they need to protect themselves from from increasingly sophisticated social engineering threats. It's kind of like having a security team that has eyes everywhere, and their digital risk protection takes it one step further by keeping an eye on every channel to connect patterns and shut them down fast. Invest in Social Engineering defense learn more@doppel.com that's d o p e l.com so much was announced at Microsoft Build yesterday that I'm going to break the announces into separate segments so it's easier to hold it all in our minds. First up, Microsoft is going awesome all in on agents and specifically on the OpenClaw agent framework by unveiling Scout, an always on enterprise AI agent built on OpenClaw that appears as a Microsoft Teams contact to automate tasks such as scheduling. Quoting Wired, Microsoft more or less built an enterprise agent on top of openclaw, the AI tool that riveted San Francisco's early adopters at the start of 2026. Scout is designed specifically to be an assistant for Office folks who can send commands directly in teams, as if the Agen was a carbon based coworker. Scout is part of Microsoft's larger Agent First Transformation, automating how knowledge workers use software and inserting AI assistance into daily office interactions. Your company essentially hires your assistant, says Omar Shaheen, the newly appointed corporate vice president of Microsoft Scout. The whole point of having a personal assistant is that they're working when you're not working. So while you're munching on some Doritos and gossiping next to the Office vending machine, Scout is busy blocking off calendar time for next Tuesday's All Hands meeting and generating talking points. Based on recent messages, Microsoft is launching this feature with a small group of customers with the hope of expanding access soon. In addition to the team's integration, Microsoft is also testing a desktop app for Scout. This app is rolling out today to subscribers who've opted for Frontier feature Access, and it currently requires users to also have an active GitHub copilot subscription. If users tell Scout their goals and preferences, the bot can proactively assign tasks. For example, Shaheen told Scout always to protect dinner time with the family, so whenever a meeting was proposed on his calendar during that time the agent would flag it and automatically suggest rescheduling options to your colleagues. With access to your email and messages, the AI agent can attempt tasks tailored to your workload. Shaheen asks Scout to comb through all his data and make a constantly updated list of every time someone makes a promise to him, as well as every time he makes a commitment to someone else. Then Scout can send reminders to you about open tickets and draft follow up plans. Anyone who experiments with Scout should expect some rough edges as Microsoft iterates on this agent. Shaheen says his scout, nicknamed Sebastian, sent an email the other day. It was just one big run on Sentence, no formatting it's critical to find a balance of what tasks you feel comfortable automating away and what needs to happen under your direct supervision. Shaheen still sees Scout as eventually being a boon to all knowledge workers, especially those who aren't as technical and wouldn't feel comfortable operating an agent through the terminal. Internally, our sales organization is probably the largest and fastest growing group that's using this, he says. As more companies build open Claw style tools for productivity, many of these releases are directly targeting office workers. Google's version, called Gemini Spark, was announced at that company's recent developer conference. While Google demonstrated ways that it can help automate aspects of a user's personal life, like planning a birthday party, the company also has its eye on the office, with Spark rolling out to enterprise customers sometime this year. End quote. As expected after those announces from earlier this week about the new category of hardware designed to let you do AI locally, say hello to a new Surface RTX Spark dev box featuring Nvidia's ARM based RTX Spark 128 gigabytes of unified memory and a 100 watt thermal envelope for local AI tasks. Quoting the Verge, the Surface RTX Spark dev box looks a little like the top of an Xbox Series X console, with an aluminum chassis that also doubles as a heat sink. It has a 100 watt thermal envelope, slightly more than the 45 to 80 watt thermal envelopes for Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops. This miniature Surface PC also has 128 gigabytes of unified memory, making it capable of running up to 120 billion parameter models locally. Microsoft is preconfiguring the RTX Spark dev box with apps like visual studio, code, GitHub, Copilot and other tools. Surface RTX Spark dev box ships with Windows 11 Pro Pre configured for developers at the image level, explains Andrew Hill, corporate vice president of Surface. The setup keeps developers in the workflow Dark theme taskbar simplified for development Widgets removed Do not Disturb on developer Mode is enabled. PowerShell 7 is the default shell. The RTX Spark dev box joins similar options from other OEMs that are embracing Nvidia's new RTX Spark chips for miniature PCs. It's also a direct replace for Qualcomm's canceled Snapdragon dev Kit, the miniature Windows on ARM PC that was originally supposed to ship two years ago. The dev kit was supposed to help developers port their apps to Windows on arm, but Qualcomm faced some complications with hardware quality. While we don't have full specifications or pricing, the RTX Spark dev box will be available later this year in the US From Microsoft's online store. End quote. I'm going to pause here to note that for the first time in years, Sam Altman was not present at Microsoft build and OpenAI was barely mentioned at all in the keynote. So it is clear that the conscious uncoupling between Microsoft and OpenAI is actively happening. Microsoft even debuted my thinking one, its first advanced reasoning AI model trained from the ground up on clean data without distillation from third party models according to Microsoft. Oh, and they also debuted seven other AI models, including including a reasoning model and an ultra efficient coding model fine tuned for GitHub. Microsoft has its own suite of models for everything now quoting the Verge According to Microsoft, mythinking one 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, they're focused on image generation, transcription, voice encoding, my image 2.5 and the flash version can do text to image and image editing. MyTranscribe 1.5 is five times faster than competing models. My Voice 2 and the Flash version of that model, which Microsoft says is coming soon, adds 15 new languages and new options for voices. The new coding model, MyCode1FLASH, is inference efficient and is integrated into GitHub, Copilot and Visual Studio code. But maybe the target isn't OpenAI at all. Quoting the FT Microsoft is releasing a series of new AI models in a bid to catch up with leading AI lab Anthropic, whose focus on business users poses a threat to the company's dominant software products. The company's AI chief, Mustafa Suleiman, told the FT that Microsoft's superintelligence team was less concerned with the consumer oriented approach taken by leading labs at Google Meta and OpenAI. We're more focused on the Anthropic style, which is enterprise use cases, developers and coding, he said. That's the journey we've been on. The former Google DeepMind co founder was speaking ahead of Microsoft's Build developer conference on Tuesday, at which he unveiled seven AI models, including one focused on reasoning that the company claims is comparable in coding abilities to Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model released in February. Soliman said Microsoft was now at the absolute frontier before conceding that Anthropic, which has released two higher performing models since Opus 4.6, was still ahead by several months. We've closed an enormous gap in six months, suleyman said. Suleyman said that the combination of a coding and reasoning model, which can break down complex tasks into smaller pieces, would help the software giant build thinking and coding agents, autonomous bots that can carry out tasks for users. That would represent a significant boost for business customers. He added Microsoft's model development would also help drive down its costs over time as the group sacrifices significant margin to Anthropic when serving its products to customers. It translates into real dollars on the bottom line. End quote. AI is uncharted territory and many leaders are trying to navigate through without a guide to help them. That's why Morning Brew created the Intelligence Shift, a new podcast with PwC. It's all about how AI is fundamentally changing different industries. Host Dan Priest sits down with people who work with AI on a daily basis. Together, they discuss real stories, real strategies and real takeaways for leaders. Get guidance from industry experts listen to the intelligence shift Wherever you get your podcast. You know how after a meeting you end up spending too much time trying to piece everything together, going back through notes, trying to remember what was actually said. It adds up fast, but that's where Plod Note Pro comes in. It's a small AI powered device about as thin as a credit card that captures discussions, meetings and calls and turns them into searchable notes and summaries automatically. So instead of doing the work twice, you can stay focused in the moment while Plaud handles organization afterwards. This means less time reconstructing conversations later and more time moving things forward. 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has always been core to Microsoft's identity is being a platform play, right? Well, what about a platform for agents, or at least agent first devices? Quoting GeekWire a team inside Microsoft has been quietly building a platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps based on Android instead of Windows. With two working hardware designs so far, and an initial set of big name companies lined up to run pilots. The platform, dubbed Project Solara, is Microsoft's bet that AI will open up entirely new scenarios for computing, using agents to avoid the constraints of traditional software and off the shelf components to develop new devices quickly and inexpensively. Microsoft is racing against Google, Amazon, OpenAI and others to bring AI to devices and provide the technical backbone for a new generation of computing. In effect, the company is attempting to repeat with AI what it did for personal computers five decades ago, with much stiffer competition this time, but also far greater technical freedom. Boundaries are collapsing, said Stevie Betheach, the Microsoft corporate vice president and technical fellow who leads its Applied Sciences group. You don't necessarily need the traditional app model. You don't need the traditional way of developing experiences. The company unveiled Solara on Tuesday at its build conference in San Francisco, describing it as a new platform that spans from chip to cloud Geekwire got a behind the scenes look at the project during a briefing last week in Redmond, including demos of the first two concept devices based on the platform. One was a desktop hub that sits beside a PC in response to voice commands, signs users in using facial recognition and surfaces the day's most pressing items. With a monitor attached, it becomes a full Windows machine running in a cloud. The second device was a wearable badge that reimagines the standard employee ID card. A fingerprint button wakes an agent in one press, a single tap records and transcribes a conversation, and a built in camera lets the agent act on what the user sees. Microsoft says it won't ship these devices itself. Instead, it envisions hardware makers and other industry partners turning the reference designs into implementations of their own, each intended for a specific industry, company or scenario. For example, in one demo shown by the company, the high tech badge ran on agents designed for use by a health care worker, including the ability to scan a patient's QR code, record and transcribe the visit log vitals and start a prescription. In another application of the same badge, the built in camera scanned a brainstorm board with ideas for an office revamp and made a suggestion add some plants. The two devices are a starting point. The bigger opportunity, the company says, is all the tasks and workflows where a PC or phone gets in the way and isn't practical to use. A display inside the Microsoft Applied Sciences Lab gave a hint of where things could be headed, including smart glasses, rings, earbuds, scanners and other form factors. End Quote. Other announces from yesterday Microsoft Execution containers, a Windows level sandbox for AI agents and Microsoft said partners OpenAI, Nvidia, Manus and NAOS Research are already using that. GitHub unveiled a GitHub Copilot desktop app in Technical Preview, which introduces a new feature called Canvases for bidirectional work between users and agents. Sort of the back and forth of pitting Claude against Claude that I described in that bonus episode recently. And finally, AI is the star of this moment, but Microsoft wants you to know it is thinking of the next Next Big Thing, quoting Reuters Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled a new quantum computing chip that it redesigned with the help of AI, saying it now believes it will have commercially useful quantum machines by 2029. The new target date puts Microsoft on track to have quantum computers the same year as rival IBM, which last month said it plans to spend $10 billion on quantum machines. It also spun out a company to make quantum chips for others with backing from President Donald Trump's administration. The biggest change to Microsoft's internally made chip versus its predecessor is that it uses an entirely new set of materials. While Google, IBM and many others make quantum chips with superconducting wires made out of aluminum, Microsoft will be made out of lead, a larger atom. Microsoft made the switch with the help of AI tools that it developed for use in materials science, and the result was a thousand fold improvement in some aspects of Majorana 2's performance, said Jason Zander, an executive vice president at Microsoft who oversees the firm's quantum efforts. The breakthrough, Zander said, was figuring out how to use lead, which is water soluble on a chip without the lead washing away during the manufacturing process. The reason why people don't use it to build chips is it requires an incredibly specialized process to be able to go figure that out, and we figured it out, xander said. Microsoft's approach to quantum computing relies on quasi particles known as majoranas, which had not been proven to exist until Microsoft claimed to have observed them. Those claims have kicked off a flurry of criticism among physicists who say Microsoft has not publicly released enough data to verify its claims. The publication Science last year alerted readers that it was investigating the data used in an earlier Microsoft study from 2020, and some critics of Microsoft's earlier papers say that the problem with its data and protocols still exist in the research released on Tuesday. Microsoft can use as much lead as they like. It is not going to shield them from the basic scientific principle that your results need to be reproducible, said Henry Legg, a lecturer in quantum physics at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Microsoft executives said that trade secrets prevent the company from releasing all of its data, but that it has been shared extensively in confidential discussions with the U.S. defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is evaluating the feasibility of several different types of quantum systems. We've done enough of the physics to really have great data, xander said of the criticism of Microsoft's approach. Believe me, I would not spend the money on the engineering if I felt like we were still off on the physics. End quote. Finally today, quick note that President Trump has signed that scaled back AI executive order that seeks to address AI's cybersecurity threats. Sources say it imposes less scrutiny on AI than the scrapped version. Quoting Politico, the final text asks some AI companies to submit their powerful new models to a voluntary government review 30 days before releasing the products to the public, a pause that would give federal agencies some time to gauge what threats the products may pose to sensitive financial national security and other computer systems. An earlier draft of the order had called for a voluntary review as much as 90 days in advance, a provision that some AI industry officials had called to onerous, Politico reported last month. The action also creates a classified benchmarking process to assess the national security implications of advanced AI models and determine which are covered by the policy. This will be overseen by the National Security Agency director in consultation with cybersecurity and technology leaders from the White House, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Pentagon. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.
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