Microsoft teases new era of AI-driven devices

Microsoft, the company known for its operating system and apps, has ⁠hinted at a new wave of gadgets that will use AI agents designed to complete specific tasks in healthcare and retail rather than traditional apps.

At Microsoft's annual software developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft executives revealed Project Solara, a family of prototypes that includes devices around the size of a smart speaker or keycard badge, based on ‌chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek. 

The devices have screens and microphones, but instead of running ‌an ‌operating system and apps like a smartphone, Microsoft executives showed them hosting AI ‌agents that talk to cloud-computing systems to carry out specific tasks, such as documenting ⁠a medical visit with a nurse.

"It's a new platform, but perhaps more importantly, it's a set of new platform rules that don't, in some sense, hem in what you can imagine," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during a keynote address. 

Microsoft is competing against rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic to sell cloud-based AI tools for ​coding and other tasks, while also trying to nudge Microsoft customers toward running AI technologies on the fleets of laptop and desktop computers running its Windows operating systems.

Nvidia-powered 'dream machine'

Microsoft on Tuesday showcased a new computer called ⁠the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box loaded with an Nvidia chip.

Nadella said the forthcoming computer was a "dream machine." There is a wait list to buy the computer and Nadella said he is on it, too.

The new machine uses an Nvidia chip, unveiled earlier this week, to help bring AI directly to PCs.

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box follows a laptop that Microsoft introduced with Nvidia this week, and Microsoft executives showed it running an AI model with 120 billion parameters - a rough measure of a model's complexity - that most PCs would not be able to load. 

The new wave of PCs is priced to compete with Apple's premium offerings, and their announcement helped boost shares of both Microsoft ​and major PC makers such as Dell Technologies, though analysts said it ⁠may take time for businesses to adopt the new machines. 

Microsoft said it ⁠is developing new tools to help Windows run OpenClaw, a piece of open-source software that can direct groups of AI bots called agents to carry ​out everyday tasks for users. 

Many of the tools Microsoft showed on Tuesday are aimed at making OpenClaw, which has gained popularity ‌in China and helped ⁠rival Apple sell Mac computers, safe enough for businesses to use on computers with sensitive corporate data.

Onstage during a demo, executives showed how a corporate IT department could prevent users from inadvertently deleting all the files on their desktop.

"You can totally run OpenClaw inside your company now," Peter ‌Steinberger, the Austrian software engineer who created OpenClaw, said during a guest appearance.

New agents, AI models

Microsoft also said it would introduce a new AI agent called Scout that can carry out tasks such as gathering up emails or messages that need a decision from the user to move forward.

Microsoft also showcased the work of its AI unit's superintelligence ​team, formed late last year. Aiming to catch up to rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, the unit released what it called the most efficient transcription AI model of any cloud hyperscaler and an image model to vie with Google's.

MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft's first reasoning model, matched the performance of Anthropic's Claude Opus ‌4.6, launched earlier this ⁠year, said Mustafa Suleyman, who heads Microsoft's AI ​efforts. Anthropic last week announced Opus 4.8.

Microsoft also introduced a technology called Web IQ, an AI agent that can perform web searches.