Microsoft Takes on Frontier AI with Project Solara, OpenClaw, and More at Build 2026 | Diet TBPN

Microsoft Build is satisfying for a number of reasons. They're in the foundation model game. They trained a bunch of models. MAI Code won Flash. MAI Thinking won the company's first coding and reasoning models, respectively. Several speakers played up as super efficient on a cost per token basis in the ROI race. You got to be efficient. Microsoft Scout is an agent. They're OpenClaw-pilled now, powered by OpenClaw, open source technology that operates across cloud, desktop, and web, connecting to Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint. And to the data that powers your day, including chats, emails, calendar, contacts. Good news if you're all in on the Microsoft ecosystem. Uh, and then we talked about this a little bit with the Jensen announcements from NVIDIA. They're going into the PC market more. Uh, the, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is sort of the answer to Apple's Mac mini custom silicon designed for a Gentic AI. There's also a new Android-based OS, operating system designed to run agents instead of apps called Project Solara. And there's a pretty cool demo, so we should play the video. The Verge always does a cutdown of these keynotes. They take you through Microsoft Build in 25 minutes, but we're only going to play a couple of minutes of this because it's a long presentation. I'm really excited about— in order to tap into all this compute power is to expand the scope of Windows ML and Windows AI. We are also announcing two very cool new models that are all going to run on Windows in box. Okay, let's jump to 8 minutes because this is where Satya introduces Project Solara, which Ben Thompson said Project Solara is, to be very clear, vaporware at this point, although the company did show real devices and has signed up Qualcomm and MediaTek as chip partners. It's It's also extremely compelling, so Ben Thompson likes it. Let's listen to Satya Nadella introduce it. Two very broad categories. The first is stationary and the second is portable. The first device is designed for your desk and it's built on MediaTek silicon. Like concept cars. With Hello for Business, just walking up to the device securely signs you in, giving you direct access to your agents. Amazon and Google Home have similar products at this point with screens. For more smart home. You think, plan, and even act by delegating tasks to your agents with a simple tap or just using your voice. It even supports experiences like handoff between devices, acting as a companion. It's still tricky to imagine when you wouldn't want to use your phone for this since people carry their phones everywhere. Firing off an agent isn't the most cumbersome thing, but I do love consumer hardware, so I'm excited to see if there's any unique things that you can do only with this product. Lightweight form factor designed for agent interactions. This is a very interesting thing. It's not a phone. It looks more like a smart keycard or badge. Yeah, it even has his face on it like it's a badge that you wear. Fingerprint. I tap to unlock the device and I have access now to all my agents in a secured manner. And would you look at that? I already have a task. And it says, gather content for your social media post.

Sorry if I missed it. Why would you want this over having an application on your phone?

I'm not sure. Yes, thank you. That's a good question. Find some good shots. Does anyone have an answer?

There's, there's, uh, there's a new meme, the two-phone meme. Yeah, you know, maybe some people feel left out, they want a second device.

There's like the dumb phone route where you don't want everything in the phone, but you do want to kick off agents that go do things for you. You want to be more like delegating instead of like consuming. Like you're not going to be scrolling TikTok on that thing, but you might be firing off work tasks that you can come to later on your desktop and sort of lock in on. I don't know.

I could prompt it and say, write a 20,000-word message to John telling him that I would like to hang out on Saturday.

Afternoon.

Yeah, make sure it's easy enough to digest so his agent can summarize it into a few bullet points.

Yeah, into ideally just one sentence. Wanna hang out? Um, let's see. Uh, Ben Thompson broke it down a little bit. He said, first off, note the framing. The PC is old tech with agents. What about new tech uniquely enabled by agents? And note the classic Microsoft hook: could that new tech sit on top of a new platform? He says there was one brief moment in the promotional video that preceded his appearance that made the concept click for him. The problem with wearable devices is the interaction model. They are only useful when you are interacting with them, when the human is in the loop. But being in the loop with a wearable is annoying and inefficient. What is being demonstrated here, however, is a brief interaction and then the agent doing work in the background. In other words, the usefulness happens in the cloud without the human needing to be involved because an agent is doing work. That's what Ben Thompson finds compelling. On one hand, You can make the case that, of course, Microsoft would be interested in a device model that uses the cloud as a platform, given that Microsoft doesn't control a mobile device like the iPhone. What occurs to Ben Thompson, however, is that even if Microsoft doesn't succeed with Project Solara, this model, where the cloud is the hub and multiple devices are the spoke instead of the phone being at the center, is clearly a better one for agents. Agents work best in the cloud and across apps and devices. Yes, the phone might be one of those devices, but when it comes to agents, it shouldn't be the hub because it's too locked down. He says again, this is vaporware and it's very much in Microsoft's interest. So take Project Solara with an appropriate grain of salt. It's a vision of the future, however, that does make a lot of sense, particularly in an enterprise scenario where all of the context and compute is already in the cloud. And Project Solara is focused on enterprise, not consumer. So you can mandate effectively that all of your employees carry these as their badges and then they have a sort of like secure on-ramp to their enterprise agents in the cloud that all run in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. He says it's also something completely different from the past and fits Ben Thompson's thesis that in the age of AI, thin is in because the compute is so constrained to the data center. On-device compute is maybe gonna happen, but there's a lot that you can do in the cloud that you can't do locally. So just have a very thin client and that little, keycard device is basically the thinnest client you can have. Its sole purpose is to just interface. It looks a lot like the Rabbit R1, sort of that form factor, which a lot of people were taking little victory laps on behalf of the founder of the Rabbit R1 saying he was just a little bit too early because the actual decision to offload all the compute to the cloud, do something useful up there, have a very minimal device that maybe you could take out with you that could do some basic stuff, But it's always hard because people like the phone. They like being able to just watch a full movie on their phone if they want. And you never know.

Has anybody been running down making a smart AI-enabled cowboy hat? That'd be a good one. Because a cowboy hat, you potentially have a lot of room up here for onboard some low-cost compute, right?

Potentially.

Maybe you could build a Starlink into it.

I feel like you would not wear the smart cowboy hat. Just frying your brain with the Mac Mini on your head. You're going to be against that. There's no way you're picking that up. Alex Heath, friend of the show, summed up the embrace of OpenClaw in a post. Scout is what it's called at Microsoft's first proactive AI agent for Copilot. Buried the news that Satya Nadella is fully embracing OpenClaw when Scout is released more widely this summer, will be powered by OpenClaw, and Microsoft will contribute its security guardrails back to the project's open source ecosystem. A lot of people that got excited by OpenClaw sort of we saw the, the rough edges and we saw this with the Meta AI, the Instagram account theft that was going on. You can imagine that if you have something that's as powerful as Open Cloud, but still constrained within your Microsoft ecosystem, your, your, all your cloud accounts, you could do things that are useful, pull together spreadsheets, PowerPoints, databases, all this different stuff, but not run roughshod over everything. And so if you're all in on one walled garden, the walls are actually somewhat safe. So Microsoft getting in bed with OpenClaw makes a lot of sense, says Alex Heath. You only welcome a growing open framework onto your turf when you're confident you can control the ground it stands on. In this case, Microsoft is doing what it does best, being a platform company rather than trying to own too much of the stack. Microsoft also gets to ride the agent wave in a way its main hardware rival won't. Even with OpenClaw's initial buzz driving a surge in Mac mini purchases, it's highly unlikely Apple will create a white glove experience for Microsoft, for OpenClaw, like Microsoft has with Scout.

One of the primary beneficiaries of the OpenClaw boom in terms of—

They really did sell out. They really have sold out all over the place.

But not going to embrace it.

Not—

Yeah. Just not enough.

They just don't have the enterprise motion necessarily.

Well, that, but also the security, privacy.

Yeah. But WWDC is next week. And who knows? Maybe we will see an OpenClaw competitor. Maybe we will see something that's, that's, you know, a great leap forward for Apple in the AI and the Apple intelligence feature set. I don't know. I'm— my predictions are something that look a lot more just like, okay, Siri works now. It can do the basic shortcut integrations. It can answer questions at a near frontier level. It's running Gemini under the hood. And so it's probably going to be pretty good at just answering basic questions, doing basic things on your phone. I'm not expecting it to go and like worm its way into every other app like OpenAI has. So there's a few other observations that Alex Heath had from Microsoft Build. Nadella is trying to tamp down the data center backlash. You know, it's getting bad out there when a Mag7 CEO is debunking water usage fears. The quote was, in fact, the daily water usage over the course of the entire year is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use. The Copilot super app is not ready. Alex Heath showed off what the new Autopilot tab with Scout looks like, but it wasn't shown on stage. So that is delayed as it rolls out to become the Copilot super app that will sit alongside all of the Microsoft apps. Microsoft is still not at the frontier according to Alex Heath. He says it didn't make a big deal outta the benchmarks for its new family of models. There were other comps, they were comping it to older models from Anthropic and OpenAI. There were some, obviously some great cost-benefit tradeoffs. It's important to be in the game. Do you have more context on how these models are performing?

Yeah, I think the interesting comparison here is, is not with Frontier Labs, but I think with Meta. Yeah. Because they had MuseSpark pretty recently. The thinking model, like MAI-THINKING-1. Yeah. It's actually like quite competitive with the Meta, which is interesting because I feel like I just have not heard that much about the MAI team. Like obviously they have They have Mustafa, and that's kind of like the big name at Microsoft. But like Meta, you hear like over and over.

Because they went through all the coaching talent wars. Yeah, talent war thing. Yeah, yeah. Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Alex Wong. You have so many people that have like, you know, have done podcasts to have aura and have clout in the industry coming together. Not to mention like the actual researchers that they recruited.

Yeah, so it's interesting that they're actually like, these are pretty solid models. Yeah, in many ways, the researchers would actually be more important than—

Yeah, but in terms of like building hype around whatever you're working on, like Meta has definitely built the aura of MSL and TBD Labs. There's a whole article about Alex Wang and Meta in the Journal or the Financial Times today. We can get to that later. But Alex, he says agents are the new OS. I'm not sure if an AI access badge with a screen will do it. He's skeptical. Are you putting on the badge?

I'll throw on the badge.

I would throw on the badge for a little bit. I wonder how often I would actually reach for it versus a phone. Although I love PCs and I love Windows for gaming, I don't— I've never been like a— run my whole life in Outlook and Microsoft Teams and all of that. So, I feel like I would get 1% of the benefit of that. You got to be all in on that ecosystem.

Got to be all in. You got to be pushing your chips in.

For sure. For sure. We will keep tracking that. What else is going on? Okay. Live reading, reacting thread from Stochasm. There's a ton to go through on MAI thinking. Was there anything interesting in this thread. Stochasm says, "I also have to wonder how much of this report is informed by what they know about IP, OpenAI's IP." So of course they have access to intellectual property from OpenAI for training and they have access to the models. But one of the things that kept coming up in this presentation is that Microsoft is sort of touting like a very clean pre-training dataset so that you as a company who are using this model, can be very confident that it's not going to get you in any trouble down the road because if the New York Times doesn't wanna be in there or Harry Potter books don't wanna be in there, it's not in there because Microsoft has done all the hard work to sanitize all the training data. They also made a very big point that they did not distill on another lab, which has been accusations that have been thrown around a bunch. During the Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit, Elon was on the stand and mentioned that he might have, or xAI folks might have done some distillation on either Anthropic or OpenAI models at one point. And so that was sort of like not the cleanest thing and might lead to problems down the road. Microsoft saying, hey, we're getting out in front of this, there's no distillation involved at all. And then they also launched a lot of features for companies to be able to fine-tune these models. Slightly different than what Amazon does. Amazon does mid-training. They give you a checkpoint of the pre-train and then you can add data that is relevant to your business and fine-tune it from a mid-training checkpoint. Microsoft is offering more of a reinforcement learning, RLE, post-training step. But all of these lend themselves to— there is a model that has a bunch of great capabilities at the baseline and good price per performance and it runs on Azure and they've already optimized it for the systems. And then You can take it, tweak it, fine-tune it, and then you can deploy it on the same hardware and you know it's gonna run, you know how much it's gonna cost, per token, you're good to go. But it's gonna answer your particular questions, work for your particular business a little bit better. At least that is the pitch. That is the hope. We will see what adoption is like. Microsoft clearly has a strong go-to-market team, strong enterprise sales team. So we will hear how this is being deployed in the near future. You know, I think, The AI, agentic commerce could be big because if you get hit with like a $500 million bill for your agentic AI, you might not, it might be over the wire limit. So you might need to use, you might need to transfer like tens of thousands of Bitcoin, low fees. This is valuable. That's the future of agentic commerce potentially, who knows?

For all the people getting hit with half a billion dollar bills.

It happens.

Joe Weisenthal is tracking the popularity of Various running shoe brands. He says on r/runningshoogeeks, 1 out of 18 posts mention a major Chinese running shoe brand. Just last quarter, it was 1 out of 40. Li-Ning is the big one. Li-Ning, of course, signed a shoe endorsement contract with—

Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry. Haven't the basketball shoes been made in China for a long time? That was like the whole Nike thing. But I guess it's like the brand now.

Is big. Oh, that's a big— Chinese companies have acquired a bunch of brands like Arcteryx, things like that. And the next step is to actually get meaningful—

What is the best Chinese consumer brand in America? The one that Americans like the most that comes from China? It's got to be DJI, right? Yep. Drone, videographer, white coat.

Bernie was using—

I know it's a controversial company because people— see it as industrial capacity. But if you're just like, I don't think about geopolitics, but I like that my wedding video had a drone in it, and it was a DJI drone, you think about that very positively as sort of a GoPro aspirational brand. Is there anything else that pops up as Chinese brands that are loved in America? But anything at the top of your mind?

Every product on Amazon that has a name that—

Yeah, but that's not— yeah, I was going to say hoverboards, but they didn't have a brand. And a lot of the cars aren't here. I believe that they would be popular if you could get a hypercar for $20,000 like they make over there.

Temu or Shein?

Are those like really loved brands in the same way that like—

Marketplace.

DJI feels a lot closer to like a Nike brand or an Apple brand than Shein or Temu. Temu seems more like a Walmart brand. I agree with you. It's popular. Like it's certainly brand recognition is there. But in terms of brand admiration, I don't know. Can we play this video from Instagram explaining the new Call of Duty map format? They're getting into generative level design. It's not GenAI, it's not fully transformer-based, but they're creating a whole bunch of different pieces of the pie and they remix them. Let's play it. Other 3 like slabs.

Look at this. And we're able to randomize that at runtime when you're playing.

3 slabs on the map. They randomize them every time you load into the map.

That is 100. We have the content to do upwards of 900. When you play a multiplayer game for a while, like, you have this sense of discovery each time you play a new map, but that kind of quickly fades, right? You've played that map maybe 5, 10 times, you're like, "I get it, I know all the places." That never fades with Killblock.

I see this as an existential risk. I think this might be the end of TVPN. I think that once this goes live, and we're playing this in the UltraDome, we're not going to remember to go live because we're just going to be gaming too much. It's entirely possible.

I don't know. I keep coming back to Rust.

Yeah, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I'm so happy. Okay. Like, Rust for me is like a vacation destination that you have so many good memories.

Yeah.

You don't want it remixed and you're just like, no, I'm good. I like going to this beach, this place. Okay. And I'm happy to keep going back.

He's a Luddite. He's a Luddite, folks. Anyway, there's one more announcement we got to share. Anduril and NASCAR are teaming up to sell a $14,000 VR racing rig simulator. Palmer Luckey's back in the VR business. I mean, he already was with the Eagle Eye headset, but he's back in the consumer entertainment VR industry with this. Of course, he's not making the actual headset.

I believe it is a— Really, 3 days after I just put down a deposit on my own of Sam.

Really? Yeah. Did you actually? Yeah.

No way. But I don't think that's going to be— that's going to be very specific, I imagine.

Yeah.

For, I imagine, NASCAR simulation, right? Because that's where they're focused. But very, very cool. Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare says, well, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027. But agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online. For the first time in the internet's history.

That's crazy.

Bots are now, according to Cloudflare, 57.5%.

Every time you fire something off, it's hundreds of pages. You see it in the reasoning traces and the tool calls. Let's watch this demo from Eric Leiman, friend of the show, sponsor of the show, introducing Stack, the AI operating system that lets accounting firms take on more clients without hiring, learns your firm's process, Runs the close, posts the journals, fully auditable. We're living through the biggest shift in accounting since the spreadsheet. That's a good way to frame it. And they did a very cool video for this, all practically produced. I believe this is all shot with an actual camera. They got these actual pieces. They filmed this. Not CGI, not AI. And accuracy are not negotiable. These one-off experiments.

Such a calming voice.

I love Eric doing the VO. It's great. One secure place to orchestrate AI coworkers for accounting from day one. This has been the vision of Ramp since they launched and it feels like, oh, this is the moment. Of course they have to do an AI thing, but they've been like pitching this exact thing since what, 2020, 2019? You can teach working on it longer, honestly. You go back to Parametric. And it learns over time, always giving you the final say before anything gets posted. And every action it takes is fully recorded and auditable. The more you build, the lighter the work gets, and the more clients you can take on. Stack. Ramstack. They're saying it's God mode.

It's God mode for Parametric.

It's literally God mode. Well, Go check it out. We should also watch this one last video from Martin Scorsese, Black Forest Labs. I alluded to it earlier. I saw this on Instagram and I really enjoyed it. 30 seconds of Martin Scorsese, storied filmmaker. Jordy, name your favorite Martin Scorsese movie. Doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city.

Almost medieval.

Mafia. The movie Mafia. Yeah. Isn't there—

is it The Godfather?

There is a movie. Isn't it The Godfather? No, that's Uh, you're thinking The Irishman, maybe? That is like a mafia movie. Uh, Gangs of New York. Or maybe Casino or Goodfellas. Goodfellas. Goodfellas. Anyway, let's play this. Sorry, I was not paying attention.

Let's try it and we'll go from, from what you think.

You need a place that doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city, almost medieval. Even the, the streets are narrower. Cobblestoned. The main road through the town is twisting and turning. Put the camera higher, looking down. DeMille would have his production designers do oil paintings. This is that, in a sense. Conveys a cinematic, a cinematic intelligence. Cinematic intelligence is a good tagline for Black Forest Labs. I thought that was, I thought it was really, really good. What a way to like, you know, hammer— obviously filmmaking's deeply controversial, but you get Martin Scorsese talking about it, and he's at least gonna perk up people's ears and they're going to listen to what he has to say. Yeah. And think about it. Is it a tool? Could it be useful in a workflow? Could it speed something up? Is it going to make the next Martin Scorsese movie? Probably not this year, but will he potentially be using it when he's thinking about what to work on next? Sure. Uh, so fun, fun project and very cool video from Black Forest Labs. Anyway, tomorrow we have a special show, but we will still see you at 11 AM Pacific sharp. And leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow.

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Have a good evening.