San Francisco (United States) (AFP) – Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled its own cutting-edge artificial intelligence models in San Francisco — a crucial step toward reducing its dependence on OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Microsoft, the first company to have invested massively in OpenAI, has for several years been seeking to reduce its reliance on its Sam Altman-led partner. It renegotiated their alliance last year and retains only a non-exclusive license on its technology until 2032.
But Microsoft chief Satya Nadella has been saying it for years: he refuses to end up like IBM, the computing giant that backed the rise of Microsoft before being supplanted by the upstart company in the 1980s. “It’s important that we are self-sustaining and are not taking huge dependencies, as this is a very fast-moving, highly fluctuating environment,” Sophie Lebrecht, who joined the group’s AI team in March, said during a press visit to its Silicon Valley campus.
At its annual developer conference, Microsoft Build, the group unveiled MAI-Thinking-1, its first “reasoning” model — AI systems that break down problems step-by-step before responding, similar to offerings from OpenAI, Google or Anthropic. Microsoft says it built the model “from scratch” with “no distillation” of rival models — a common shortcut that involves copying a competitor’s outputs to train a new system more cheaply and quickly. The tool, still limited to a select group of customers, arrives roughly a year and a half behind pioneers such as OpenAI and Google.
Microsoft also unveiled other in-house models for generating images, transcribing audio, creating synthetic voices, and coding. Joining the broader Silicon Valley craze, the group aims to ride the wave of so-called “agentic” AI, which has moved the technology beyond a simple chatbot to one that acts on your behalf.
– From ‘virus’ to feature –
It unveiled Microsoft Scout, an “always-on” assistant — for preparing meetings, managing schedules, and drafting emails — based on OpenClaw, the open-source software whose global popularity launched this wave in late 2025. Nadella at the time called it “a virus,” with Silicon Valley alarmed by online security incidents triggered by the autonomous agents. Less than a year later, OpenClaw’s Austrian creator, Peter Steinberger, took the Microsoft stage on Tuesday to applause from executives and developers.
Scout is available only to a limited circle of customers. Last month, Google unveiled its own autonomous agent, Gemini Spark, reserved for its premium US subscribers. Microsoft also announced a Nvidia-powered mini-PC, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, capable of running AI models offline, as well as an AI platform dedicated to scientific research.
For bringing AI into the home, Microsoft unveiled its hardware bet: an ecosystem of Android-based devices designed to interact by voice with AI agents, without opening applications as on a computer or smartphone. On stage, the company showed two prototypes: a desk speaker with a screen that recognizes you by face, displays your tasks for the day, and can double as a computer once plugged into a monitor; and a wearable badge for conversing with your AI agent, developed with Qualcomm.
© 2024 AFP
