标签：#microsoft

This week on the Engaadget Podcast, we dive into NVIDIA's RTX Spark chip and the many ways it could reshape the world of Windows PCs (or not).

Arm CPU cores, a powerful GPU and gobs of unified RAM? That sounds familiar!

I can't remember the last time Microsoft kicked off a Build keynote with Windows front and center, but that's exactly what CEO Satya Nadella did this week. Nadella didn't address the issues Microsoft is trying to fix in Windows 11 but chose to woo the audience with Microsoft's slick Surface RTX Spark Dev Kit instead, […]

Create a storage account and configure high availability. Create a storage account for the internal private company documents. In the portal, search for and select Storage accounts . Select + Create . Select the Resource group created in the previous lab. Set the Storage account name to private . Add an identifier to the name to ensure the name is unique. Select Review , and then Create the storage account. Wait for the storage account to deploy, and then select Go to resource . This storage requires high availability if there’s a regional outage. Read access in the secondary region is not required. Configure the appropriate level of redundancy . Explanation A storage account is like a digital locker in the cloud. Resource group is a folder that organizes related services. High availability means your files stay safe even if one region (data center area) has problems Configure Redundancy In the storage account, in the Data management section, select the Redundancy blade . Ensure Geo-redundant storage (GRS) is selected. **Refresh **the page. Review the primary and secondary location information. Save your changes. Explanation : Redundancy means keeping copies of your files in multiple places. GRS ensures your files are copied to another region for safety. Create a storage container, upload a file, and restrict access to the file. Create a private storage container for the corporate data. In the storage account, in the Data storage section, select the Containers blade. Select + Container . Ensure the Name of the container is private . Ensure the Public access level is Private (no anonymous access). As you have time, review the Advanced settings, but take the defaults. It means: don’t change anything in the Advanced settings unless the lab specifically tells you to. Azure already chooses safe, recommended defaults for you. Select Create . Explanation : A container is like a folder inside your storage account. Setting Public access level to Private means nobody can see

Some quantum computing companies we've covered have done recent progress updates.

Just in case you were wondering, Nvidia's RTX Spark isn't supposed to be a one-off. The company is not just flirting with becoming the fifth high-profile vendor of consumer laptop chips to see if people bite. At Computex 2026 in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed at least two additional generations of RTX Spark are […]

At Microsoft's annual Build conference on Tuesday, the company announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives, including a super app, in-house reasoning models, a cybersecurity tool, and OpenClaw-esque AI agents. All this news added up to a clear message: Microsoft is positioned to be one of the biggest players in AI, and it's […]

Microsoft has two new Surface devices arriving later this year, both powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark chips. I got a chance to take a closer look at both the Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at Microsoft's Build conference this week, and while both have the same chip inside, they're utilizing Nvidia's […]

Microsoft launched seven new in-house AI models at Build 2026 on June 2, 2026, marking the company's most significant push yet to build its own frontier AI stack independent of OpenAI. The centerpiece is MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft's first large-scale reasoning model, built from scratch on clean commercially licensed data using a sparse Mixture of Experts architecture. Alongside it: MAI-Code-1-Flash, a 5-billion-parameter coding model that outperforms Claude Haiku 4.5 by 16 percentage points on SWE-Bench Pro while using 60% fewer tokens on complex tasks. This is the complete developer guide to all seven MAI models, their specs, benchmarks, deployment paths, and what they mean for the AI development ecosystem. Why Seven Models at Once? The strategic context matters. For three years, Microsoft's AI product surface — GitHub Copilot, Azure AI, Bing Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot — ran almost entirely on OpenAI models. The Build 2026 announcement is Microsoft's public declaration that it is building a parallel, proprietary model stack. Every new MAI model is trained from scratch using "clean and appropriately licensed data, without distillation from third-party models" — language that directly addresses the intellectual property concerns that have accompanied third-party model licensing. The distribution strategy is equally deliberate. Microsoft is not routing MAI models exclusively through Azure. MAI-Thinking-1 and MAI-Code-1-Flash are available via Fireworks AI, Baseten, and OpenRouter — three infrastructure providers that collectively reach developers who explicitly do not want cloud vendor lock-in. This signals a platform-first posture: Microsoft wants MAI to become a model ecosystem, not just an Azure feature. MAI-Thinking-1: The Reasoning Flagship MAI-Thinking-1 is Microsoft's answer to Claude Opus 4.x and GPT-5.5 on the reasoning side of the model spectrum. The architecture is a 35-billion-parameter active / approximately 1-trillion-parameter total sparse Mixture of Ex

One hardware announcement and several software highlights from Microsoft Build.

Intel couldn't catch a break. Layoffs. Shakedowns. Crashing CPUs torpedoing its reputation, sending desktop gamers fleeing to AMD. Apple and Qualcomm pushing Intel out of multiple flagship laptops. A gaming graphics card going MIA. But its Panther Lake laptop chip, the first on its all-important 18A process, turned out excellent - and a handheld version […]

Microsoft just kicked off Build 2026 with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella and other company leaders. As expected, it was filled with announcements, ranging from new Surface hardware to an always-on personal assistant and updates across Microsoft's in-house AI models. If you didn't watch the event live, you can catch up on all the […]

Microsoft on Tuesday took the wraps off Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing, an open source framework for spinning up AI evaluations.

Microsoft claimed last year that it had made a key breakthrough in quantum computing with Majorana 1, the company's first quantum processor. While physicists were immediately skeptical of Microsoft's claims, the software giant is announcing Majorana 2 today, the next generation of its topological quantum chip. Majorana 2 contains qubits, a unit of information in […]

Microsoft announced a bunch of new in-house AI models at Build 2026, including a new "flagship" model: MAI-Thinking-1. It's an ambitious step into model development for Microsoft, which introduced its initial in-house models last year - before then, it had relied on OpenAI's models. The two companies recently renegotiated their deal to loosen ties. According […]

Launched at Build, Microsoft Scout is a new AI assistant meant to bring the power and flexibility of OpenClaw into the Microsoft 365 system.

Microsoft’s OpenClaw-style agent appears in Teams, just like a human colleague, and automates your dull office tasks.

The specification lets developer, compliance, and security teams define their own policies for agents to follow in portable policy files.

Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more. Unlike Copilot that lives inside […]

The company demoed Solara on an Echo Show-style smart display and a smart key badge.