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Microsoft Takes on Frontier AI with Project Solara, OpenClaw, and More at Build 2026 | Diet TBPN
03 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What are the highlights of Microsoft Build 2026?
Microsoft Build is satisfying for a number of reasons. They're in the foundation model game. They train a bunch of models. MAI Code One Flash, MAI Thinking One, 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've got to be efficient. Microsoft Scout is an agent.
Chapter 2: How is Microsoft entering the foundation model game?
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.
And then we talked about this a little bit with the Jensen announcements from Nvidia, they're going into the PC market more. The Surface RTX Spark dev box is sort of the answer to Apple's Mac Mini, custom silicon designed for agentic 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 cut-down of these keynotes. They take you through Microsoft Build in 25 minutes, but we're only going to play a couple minutes of this because it's a long presentation.
So today, one of the things that 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 gonna run on Windows Inbox.
Okay, let's jump to eight 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 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.
Concept cards for consumer technology.
Just walking up to the device securely signs you in, giving you direct access to your agents.
And Amazon and Google Home have similar products at this point with screens for more smart home?
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Chapter 3: What is Project Solara and its significance?
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 out. 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 going to happen, but there's a lot that you can do in the cloud that you can't do locally.
Just have a very thin client and that little key card device is basically the thinnest client you can have. It's sole purpose is to just interface.
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Chapter 4: How does Project Solara differ from traditional devices?
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 OpenClaw like Microsoft has with
One of the primary beneficiaries, the OpenClaw, boom, in terms of their .
They really did sell out. They really have sold out all over the place.
But not going to embrace it.
Yeah. 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 open clock competitor. Maybe we will see something that's a great leap forward for Apple in the AI and the Apple intelligence feature set. I don't know. 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 warm its way into every other app like OpenClaw 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
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of cloud-based AI agents?
I was not paying attention.
Let's try it and we'll go from from what you think I
You need a place that doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city. Almost medieval. Even the streets are narrower, cobblestone. 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 really, really good. What a way to hammer, obviously, filmmaking is deeply controversial, but you get Martin Scorsese talking about it, and he's at least going to perk up people's ears and they're going to listen to what he has to say 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. So 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 a.m. Pacific. Sharp.
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