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

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  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. 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.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:16Satya Nadella?

  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 going to run on Windows in Box.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Like concept cars for consumer technology.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  With hello for business, just walking up to the device securely signs you in, giving you direct access to your agents.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  And Amazon and Google Home have similar products at this point, with screens for more smart home.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  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. 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 key card or badge. Yeah, it even has his face on it, like it's a badge that you'd wear.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  I tapped 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 posts.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

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

• 3:18John Coogan?

  On your phone? I'm not sure. Yes, thank you. That's a good question. Does anyone have an answer?

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  There's a new meme, the two-phone meme. Maybe some people feel left out. They want a second device.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  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.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

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

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, ideally just one sentence, want to hang out. Let's see. 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 the 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.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  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. And he says, again, this is vaporware and it's very much in Microsoft's interests. 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

• 5:40John Coogan?

  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. So just have a very thin client and that little key card device is basically the thinnest client you can have.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  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 a 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.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  Has anybody been running down making a smart AI-enabled cowboy hat?

• 6:59John Coogan?

  That'd be a good one.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  Cowboy hat, you potentially have a lot of room up here for onboard. Some local

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you could build a Starlink into it.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  I feel like you would not wear the smart cowboy hat. Just frying your brain with the Mac Mini on your head. You're gonna, you're gonna 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, the 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 saw the, the rough edges. And we saw this with the Meta AI, the Instagram account theft that was going on.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  You can imagine that if you have something that's as powerful as OpenClaw, 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

• 8:34John Coogan?

  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.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  One of the primary beneficiaries of OpenClaw, boom, in terms of their Mac Mini.

• 8:47John Coogan?

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

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  But not gonna embrace it, not.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's just not. They just don't have the enterprise motion necessarily.

• 8:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, that, that, but also the security, privacy.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. But W W C 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 I I'm my predictions are something that are 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 Open Claw has. So there's

• 9:42John Coogan?

  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 out of the benchmarks for its new family of models.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  There were other comps. They were comping it to older models from Anthropic and OpenAI. There were some, obviously, some great cost benefit trade offs. It's important to be in the game. Do you have more context on how these models are performing?

• 10:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think the interesting comparison here is is not with Frontier Labs, but I think with Meta, right? Because they had Muse Spark like pretty recently. The thinking model like MAI Thinking One is actually like quite competitive with 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 the over and over.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  They went through all the coaching, talent wars, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Alex Wong. You have so many people that have like, you know, have done podcasts, have Aura and have Clout and the industry coming together, not to mention like the actual researchers that they recruited.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's interesting that they're actually like, these are pretty solid models. The researchers were actually more important than.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, but but in terms of like building, 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 and in the Journal or the Financial Times today. We can get to that later. But Alex Heath 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.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  So I, I, I feel like I would get 1% of the benefit of that. You, like, you gotta be all in on that ecosystem. Be all in. You gotta be pushing your, pushing your chips in. For sure, for sure. We will keep tracking that. What else is going on? Okay, live reading reacting thread from Stokasm. There's a ton to go through on MAI thinking. Was there anything interesting in this thread? Uh, Stokasm 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, uh, one of the things that would, that, that kept coming up in this presentation is that, uh, Microsoft is sort of touting like a very clean pre-training data set.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  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 want to be in there, or Harry Potter books don't want to be in there, it's not in there because Microsoft has done all the hard work to sanitize all the training data. And 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, uh, done some distillation on either Anthropic or OpenAI models at one point. And so that was sort of, uh, like not the cleanest thing and might lead to problems down the road.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  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, uh, companies to be able to fine tune these models. Uh, slightly different than what Amazon does. Amazon does mid-training. They give you a checkpoint of the pre-training and then you can add data that is relevant to your business and fine tune it from a mid-training checkpoint. Uh, 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

• 14:10John Coogan?

  it's going to run, you know how much it's going to cost, bur token, you're good to go. But it's going to 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, 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?

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

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

• 14:54John Coogan?

  It happens.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  Joe Weisenthal is tracking the popularity of various running shoe brands. He says on r slash running shoe geeks, one out of 18 posts mentioned a major Chinese running shoe brand. Just last quarter, it was one out of 40. Li Ning is the big one. Li Ning, of course, signed a shoe endorsement contract with.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  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, is bigger.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  That's a big, that's, it's Chinese companies have acquired, you know, a bunch of brands like Arc'teryx, things like that. And the next step is to actually get meaningful.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  What is the best Chinese consumer brand in America? The one that Americans like the most that comes from China? It's gotta be DJI, right?

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Drone, videographer, wedding photos, like.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Bernie was using.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  I know it's a controversial company because people see it as industrial capacity, but if you're just like, I, my only, 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. Has sort of a GoPro aspirational brand. Is there anything else that pops up as Chinese brands that are loved in America, but anything on the top of your mind?

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Every product on Amazon that has a name that.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's not, yeah, I, I was gonna 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.

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  Kimu or Shin?

• 16:29John Coogan?

  Are those like really loved brands in the same way that like DJI feels a lot closer to like a Nike brand or an Apple brand than Shein or Timu. Uh, Timu seems more like a Walmart brand. I, I, I agree with you. It's popular. Like it's, 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 Gen AI. It's not fully Transformer based, but they're, they're creating a whole bunch of different pieces of the pie and they remix them. Let's play it.

• 17:07Speaker 05

  Other three like slabs and we're able to randomize that at runtime when you're playing.

• 17:12John Coogan?

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

• 17:16Speaker 05

  That is a hundred. 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 five, 10 times. You're like, I get it. I know all the places. That never fades with Kill Block.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  I, I, 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.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

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

• 17:52John Coogan?

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

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

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

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. You don't want it remixed.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  And you're just like, no, I'm good. I like going to this beach, this place and I'm happy to keep going back.

• 18:08John Coogan?

  He's a lot aight. He's a lot aight, folks. Uh, anyway, uh, there's one more announcement we gotta share. Andorl and NASCAR are teaming up to sell a $14,000 VR racing rig simulator. Palmer Luckey's back in the VR business. Uh, 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.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  Really? Three days after I just put down a deposit on my own sim.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Really?

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  Did you actually?

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  No way.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think that's gonna be, that's gonna be very specific, I imagine.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  For, I imagine NASCAR simulation, right? Because that's where they're focused, but very, very cool. Matthew Prince over at CloudFlare.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  What's he saying?

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  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."

• 19:08John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Bots are now, according to CloudFlare, 57.5%.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  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 Gleiman, 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 audited, all 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 was all shot with an actual camera. They got these actual pieces. They filmed this. Not CGI, not AI.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Such a calming voice.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  I love Eric doing the VO. It's great.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  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 pitching this exact thing since, what, 2020, 2019? And working on it long-term, so you go back to Parabola.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  Stack.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Ramp Stack. They're saying it's God mode. It's God mode for accountants.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  God mode for the back office.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  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. Thirty seconds of Martin Scorsese, storied filmmaker. Jordy, name your favorite Martin Scorsese movie.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Uh, Mafia.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Mafia, the movie Mafia. Yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Isn't there, is it Godfather?

• 21:20John Coogan?

  There is a movie.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  Isn't it The Godfather?

• 21:22John Coogan?

  No, that's a...

• 21:25John Coogan?

  You're thinking The Irishman, maybe? That is like a mafia movie. Gangs of New York.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  No, you're thinking Goodfellas.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Or maybe Casino or Goodfellas.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Goodfellas.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Goodfellas. Anyway, play this. Sorry, I was not paying attention.

• 21:39Speaker 05

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

• 21:41Speaker 02

  You need a place that doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city. Almost medieval. Even 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.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Cinematic intelligence is a good tagline for Black Forest Labs. I thought that was, I thought that was really, really good. What a way to like, you know, hammer. Obviously, filmmaking is deeply controversial, but you get Martin Scorsese talking about it and he's at least gonna perk up people's ears and they're gonna listen to what he has to say.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  And think about it. Is it a tool? Could it be useful in a workflow? Could it speed something up? Is it gonna 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, 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.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Sharp.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  And leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  We love you. Have a wonderful evening.

• 23:01John Coogan?

  Goodbye.