🍭 Microsoft Just Built Its Own AI 🏗️

Good morning. Microsoft just announced it built its own AI models, while still paying OpenAI billions for theirs.

Let’s dive in 👇

🍭 What’s Cookin’:

• Microsoft dropped a full AI model family at Build

• SoftBank is pouring €75B into French data centers

• Nvidia unveiled a humanoid robot

• Wix cut 20% of its workforce

Microsoft
🏗️ Built Its Own AI Stack

The Bite:

Microsoft Build 2026 started with the broadest in-house AI product launch in the company's history.

Mustafa Suleyman's MAI Superintelligence team unveiled MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft's first dedicated reasoning model built entirely without distillation from other AI systems.

Alongside it, the company shipped MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2.5 across Microsoft Foundry.

Separately, Microsoft announced Aion 1.0 Plan, a 14-billion-parameter reasoning model that ships in-box with Windows.

And Project Polaris, a coding model designed to replace GPT-4 inside GitHub Copilot by August.

Snacks:

• MAI-Thinking-1 targets enterprise customers and was built without distilling from any existing AI model

• Aion 1.0 Plan: 14B parameters, 32K context, ships inside Windows for fully local agentic workflows

• Project Polaris replaces GPT-4 as the default model in GitHub Copilot by August 2026

• MAI-Transcribe-1 handles 25 languages and runs 2.5x faster than Azure's previous offering at $0.36/hour

• GitHub Copilot now has over 30 million active users, each generating inference costs Microsoft pays to OpenAI

• Windows Foundry hosts 11,000 models; Agent Mode is now the default across Office 365 Copilot

Why it Bites:

For most of the past three years, Microsoft's AI story had exactly one dependency: OpenAI. The $13 billion partnership gave Microsoft the models; Microsoft gave OpenAI the distribution.

It worked, until the bill started scaling with the product.

GitHub Copilot alone has 30 million users. At that volume, every token routed through OpenAI is a cost Microsoft would rather own.

Project Polaris is the answer: Microsoft's own coding model as the Copilot default.

But this isn't a breakup.

Suleyman reaffirmed the OpenAI partnership from the same stage.
Microsoft is building optionality while keeping the existing deal alive.

It still hosts OpenAI's models on Azure. It still pays for inference.
It just also has its own models now, priced lower, trained in-house, and slotted into the same products.

Now, if Microsoft's most-used developer tool no longer depends on OpenAI, and its most-used operating system ships a reasoning model built in, then…

OpenAI's largest customer just became its most capable competitor.

That may change the math on OpenAI's IPO story, its enterprise pitch, and its leverage in the next contract renegotiation.

Microsoft didn't leave the partnership. It just made the partnership optional.

Steal This Prompt
🍭 Your Face, Now Available in the Toy Aisle

Turn yourself, your co-founder, your dog, or your favorite internet character into a ridiculously polished 3D vinyl collectible figure.

Use it to:

• Turn your team into collectible figures for your About page

• Mock up toy versions of creators, founders, or fictional characters

• Create branded merch concepts without spending a dime on manufacturing

Workflow:

1. Hit this link: 3D Vinyl Collectable Figure

2. Paste into your AI model

3. Replace the #s with your character, outfit, and packaging details

4. Watch it cook into a shelf-ready collectible your inner 9-year-old would absolutely beg for

   Try the prompt on Snack Prompt

_ToolBox™
🧰 5 BRAND NEW AI LAUNCHES

🤝 Vokal
Your Claude, my Codex, their agent swarm. Finally a shared workspace where humans and AI agents can collaborate without the sacred Slack copy-paste ritual.

🛠️ Gigacatalyst
Gives Sales and CS teams engineering superpowers by learning your APIs and letting non-engineers build customer-specific features without filing a ticket and waiting three sprints.

🚀 Fundraisly
Raised a round? Cool. This AI finds the investors who actually write checks, maps warm intros, and chases meetings so founders can stop playing spreadsheet archaeologist.

🧠 Brief
Product memory for humans and agents. It remembers why decisions were made so your AI doesn't confidently rebuild the thing your team rejected six months ago.

📋 Paste MCP & AI Tools
Infinite clipboard meets AI memory. Let Claude, Codex, and friends search, organize, and use everything you've copied instead of making you hunt through 47 browser tabs.

_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

🤖 Microsoft Launches Homegrown MAI Model Family At Build 2026
→ MAI-Thinking-1, MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2. These are Microsoft's first in-house foundation models, built without distillation and designed to replace OpenAI in GitHub Copilot by August.

💽 Intel Ships Xeon 6+ On Intel 18A At Computex
→ The first data center CPU built on Intel's 18A process packs up to 288 cores and targets agentic AI inference at maximum density.

🏗️ SoftBank Commits €75B To Build 5GW Of AI Data Centers In France
→ The first phase puts €45B toward 3.1GW of capacity in northern France by 2031. It’s SoftBank's largest AI infrastructure bet in Europe.

💼 Wix Cuts 20% Of Workforce In Largest Layoff In Company History
→ CEO Abrahami cited AI replacing development and design roles alongside a 21% shekel appreciation, with the stock down over 50% in 2026.

🤖 Nvidia And Unitree Unveil Isaac GR00T Humanoid Robot At Computex
→ The open reference design pairs Unitree's 6-foot H2+ body with Sharpa's five-fingered hands and Nvidia's Jetson Thor compute.