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Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I'm your friend David Pierce and on today's show, we're going to talk about Microsoft Build. Build is Microsoft's big annual developer conference where it launches a bunch of new stuff, but also tries to just explain itself to the world and what it cares most about and what it hopes that all of its customers care about for the year to come. Big surprise, the answer this year was AI in every single imaginable way. We're going to get into all of that in just a minute, but first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Thursday,
June 4th, 2026. Instagram's new Instagram Plus subscription is rolling out. And the idea is essentially for $4 a month, you can get custom app icons. You can get a custom font in your bio, lots of little aesthetic things like that. But the big stuff is you can now keep your story up for 48 hours instead of 24. You can give your story more priority in other people's feeds so that people see it. And you get to watch other people's stories without them knowing. I think a lot of people are going to pay four bucks a month for just that one feature alone. But the big idea here is Meta increasingly wants you to
pay to get your content seen, even by the people who have said that they want to see. It feels kind of bleak if I'm honest with you. TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer, said it's struggling to keep up with AI demand. Its CEO CC Wayi said at a shareholder meeting that customer demand is so high and we can only support so much. He said, "We are doing our best to ensure TSMC does not become a bottleneck. In a time where RAM is getting more expensive than ever, chips are harder than ever to find, and it is more expensive than it has ever been to buy gadgets, this feels like bad news, especially because the CEO, CCway, also said he'd like to raise prices and that it's going to be a long time to be fully
up to speed on production in the US. Not a great sign for the price of electronics. In better news, Cash App made a magic wand for paying for stuff. It's called the Cash App wand, and it's an NFC enabled star topped wand that you can use to make onthe-go payments just by tapping. There's a big DIY trend here of people making things that are more fun to tap and pay with than a credit card or like your watch or your phone. I think it's incredibly charming. I love the Cash App is doing this. It's $25 and apparently there are more of these app tags to come. I'm excited about it. You can read more about all of this at the
verge.com. That is 90 seconds on the verge for June 4th. All right, let's get into Build and Microsoft's big plans for Windows AI and the future of pretty much absolutely everything. Joining me, Tom Warren, who was at Build all week from San Francisco. You're at Build. You've been doing the build thing all week. Uh tell me about the vibes. I remember last year's build. Weird vibes. Yeah, everybody was very angry. Protests interrupting things. Uh this one seems like it's been a little more uh sane in a certain way. Little more straightforward from Microsoft's perspective.
Yeah. So, so this year, the whole point of build this year is that it was at a smaller sort of intimate venue in San Francisco. So, they used to have Build at San Francisco like I can't remember, but it was many years ago now. There was a few protesters outside um early yesterday morning. There's none today. Um but they didn't get inside this time. So, there wasn't the sort of chaos that we had last year um where yeah, the keynote was interrupted and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, the vibes are definitely feels smaller. Um, and definitely more about getting actual developers in this time.
I get the definite sense Microsoft is trying to use this year's build to sort of stake its claim in the AI universe. There's a lot of stuff going on and I want to get into some of it, but I'm curious what your sort of big picture takeaway is in terms of like what does Microsoft want to be in a world filled with AI? I obviously spoke to Mustafa Solomon uh yesterday and he kind of took the gloves off essentially. Um which I think I get the sense that he's been wanting to do that for a little while. Um but just basically said we want to be one of the top four you know AI model creating frontier models in the world.
Um I think we haven't heard them say that exactly before because they've kind of they've had that really close open AI partnership. So I think that was a big part of build this year was it was the sort of coming out party for Microsoft AI and the models and stuff. They had like seven models and so that was a big chunk. But then on the flip side I think the other thing is there was a big presence of Windows again um which I kind of think they had to have. But also in the sense of positioning Windows to developers as being able to have this local AI compute so they don't have to worry about the tokens which is the kind of era that we're getting into now. It's like it's the cost of AI now, right? And all the token usage and that's really
bubbling up in the news cycle at the moment. Let's start with the AI stuff because I think the this question of can Microsoft be the fourth big player in this space. Uh right obviously it's it's Google deep mind anthropic and open AI are like it's those three big gap everybody else. Um, Microsoft sort of in an awkward way was tied to Open AI and I think they've they've broken up in sort of, you know, they claim it's on good terms, but it actually increasingly seems like these two companies really hate each other and are desperate to get away from each other. Um, and is this did this feel to you like Microsoft sort of laying out its own full plan on how to do this? Because, you know, they put out an operating system for AI agents.
like developer terminal. It really did feel like Microsoft being all but we now have a whole plan of Microsofts to take on all of these companies all at the same time. Do you feel like Microsoft successfully made that case? Yeah, I think so to some extent. I think like the Microsoft AI stuff, they obviously had seven models and again they were kind of like the smaller models but then they had the reasoning one which I think that's definitely a step forward from what they've been doing before cuz typically it's been very you know focused on specific tasks whether it be like images or like transcription all that sort of stuff. Um but this reasoning and the thinking model is a lot about math and code
right which is where they kind of been falling behind. like claw code and cursor and all the rest of those coding tools. So I think they've definitely put um a stake there. They want to you know they want to go aggressively after coding and I think Microsoft was early to right early to copilot stuff was way ahead of a lot of this stuff and then Microsoft got kind of left behind by the state of the art here. Yeah exactly. So I think they're trying to reverse that trend. They've successfully done that. I think the first step it's just the question of where do they go next and obviously Mustaf has said that they want to be the top four. how they go about that is
going to be very interesting. He actually said also to me that um they're going to lean on Open AI for the next few years, right? Because obviously they've got access to their models for quite some years yet. Um so they can lean on them for certain stuff whilst they basically compete, right? And then build their own and so that's that's kind of interesting um perspective which is it's unusual to hear that from uh an executive to be honest. Um but it's it's kind of what we thought along anyway really, isn't it? Um, but yeah, I think they've they've definitely started to shift the this sort of message around AI. Now, funny thing out the whole keynote, I think Copilot was only mentioned five times without it
being GitHub copilot. Yeah, that's the one thing out of the keynote is that co-pilot was barely mentioned. Like they announced the Surface laptops, their co-pilot plus PCs. It didn't even say co pilot plus PCs. like is very they're very much trying to clean up that trying to shove co-pilot everywhere. So, okay, you just made a thing make sense for me that I was actually going to ask you about which is Scout. Uh, right. This is one of Microsoft's biggest announcements was this thing Scout that is the sort of agentic like Spark open clawish model. It seems like if you're Microsoft, this is a huge place to try and do some of your own stuff, right? And yeah, we've talked a lot about the advantages that Google
has in AI where it makes a lot of apps that people use. It has a lot of data about people. Microsoft has exactly the same thing going on for like every company everywhere. So, the idea of being able to do an AI agent that sort of knows you and your business makes tons of sense. And my immediate response is, isn't this exactly co-pilot? Why on earth is this not just C-pilot? But maybe you just answered that question. Well, so the real interesting insight into this is that C-Pilot is run out of a different organization to where Microsoft Scout came from. What they also did is they announced uh a co-pilot sort of super app or autopilot is what they called. Then they kind of
shoved Microsoft Scout inside of there, but that thing does not exist. It's just a mockup. Like the sources telling me it literally doesn't exist. They've just created this image essentially. Um so there's obviously some internal politics going on here. Um because the scout stuff is on the other side of the house, but it is essentially supposed to be your sort of personal assistant, right? Like open claw is literally open claw but for the enterprise. Do you think Copilot is like a lightly toxic brand at this point? I mean, you've covered a lot the sort of relentless cro encroaching of Copilot into everything
and Microsoft sort of way overplayed its hand and has spent some time winding that back getting Copilot out of things. Yeah. Is it possible that it's just it so overextended C-pilot that it now has a branding problem that it's going to kind of slowly try to walk away from? Yeah, I think that's definitely what's happening. That's there's no doubt of that. I wouldn't say it's like necessarily toxic, but I think it's just they didn't really have focus with it.
They just started to use Copilot everywhere. The first was obviously GitHub Copilot and then Microsoft kind of like borrowed that, stole it, whatever you want to call it. Just ended with like C-pilot buttons in like paint and in notepad and just all this like craziness. Um, so I think they're definitely walking back like where Copilot shows up. Um, and to make it more like how that super app is. So they're going to sort of get all those things that they've done and put them all into this single app. Um but yeah, they had they definitely have a branding problem with it. So the other thing I'm curious about is project Solar, which I think
to me is like the you know sort of consumer products person. This is the thing I found most interesting from the whole thing is this they built a new operating system for agents essentially, right? And this is like this is the big open question right now is if you believe that AI agents are going to be foundational to how we use computers going forward. What are our computers supposed to look like? And this is obviously this is part of the NVIDIA RTX Spark question. And if you're Microsoft, it's very important that you get this right because if you get it wrong, Windows goes away, right? Like this becomes sort of existential in a way. What can you explain sort of what Solara is and what you thought of these demos? I'm curious
what they've struck. Yeah. So, so it's built on like the Android open-source project. So, um they've basically fought that and then it's it's essentially going to be a platform um for a agents across devices. So, we've seen Microsoft the only thing we've seen Microsoft do this sort of platform play multiple times in the past. A lot of the time it's obvious been Windows um but you've seen like Microsoft Band, Hollow Lens, um Windows Phone. obviously they've always tried to position themselves as a platform for future hardware, right? And it hasn't gone well. Um so I'm very skeptical of it. Um but I'm also intrigued by it. But I think the most curious thing about it is that they're positioning as a platform that run across devices like they showed a
badge concept. It's like your security card um where you could touch a button, it would transcribe and um all that sort of stuff. use a camera and then you've got this like uh Amazon Echo Show sort of like device that just scans your face, logs you in and you've got your agent. Um but I think they're not going to make those devices themselves. They're sort of trying to position this as we are going to build the platform secure etc for enterprise use and all that sort of stuff. Um but it just depends people going to you know use that platform on their devices. That's the big question. Yeah, I think that there are so many sort of ongoing questions about like what is Microsoft trying to be in this space
again, right? Like is it happy if all of it runs on Azure but not on Windows? I don't know. I just but I will say I thought the badge concept ruled like again this idea of if you're if you're Microsoft and you're trying to think, okay, how do we get AI agentic wearables into people's lives in a way that is Microsofty doing it as an employee badge? Genius. like perfect correct answer. It's a thing tons of people are already wearing. It's a thing they have on all the time. And if you can give it some of this sort of input ability, like there was a demo where it's a person standing over some kind of piece of paper
pointing a camera at it that's on it on their badge and it's inputting that way. You can use it as a voice recorder. It can display information. Like again, thousands of caveats. This is just it's this was essentially like a science fiction concept video. But that to me was one of the moments where I was like this is the most complete thought from Microsoft about how a Microsoft AI thing might work that I've seen yet. And there was just something about that I found very compelling from Microsoft in particular that was like, "Oh, maybe this company gets what they're going for now."
Yeah. No, I totally agree. I think the badge concept was super interesting. I think it's just where does it go from there? Like they showed some other sort of vague devices, didn't they? like that they obviously weren't focusing on but I think it's like they tried this with Cortana do you remember with the they had like thermostats speakers and obviously that was before we called that you know that was machine learning back then right now it's AI um but yeah that didn't really go anywhere um and they kind of abandoned that so I'm just like that's why I'm so skeptical because I've seen them do try and do this so many times in the past but I think they have the right vision
but I worry that someone else will just do It did seem to me that uh this build was ironically for a developer conference more developer focused than normal. And I think to some extent this is what you were talking about at the beginning like ordinarily they you know they have lots of sales people there and it's it's about sort of lots of people in lots of places. This felt very much like Microsoft reentering itself on developers. They spent a lot of time talking about Linux and the terminal and developer tools. Am I overthinking what happens at a developer conference here or does this feel like Microsoft actually refocusing its efforts on people who are this kind of developer that everybody is after
in an AI world? No, I think so. They've been trying to win back sort of developers trust and confidence um in Windows particular for quite some time now. Um, and obviously a lot of developers just use Mac OS or they might be on Linux as well. Um, so they've been trying to get that those people to sort of take Windows seriously for development. They did the Windows subsystem from Linux many years ago and they've kind of built on top of that build. Um, and it's all like a lot of the Windows announcements this year were very developer focused. I mean, there pretty much wasn't anything outside of um dev stuff, which I think is good because in some years over the
past sort of decade, they've they've gone very consumerheavy at build, but they've done like the terminal work as well in the past. I think this year it felt like that kind of build. Um cuz I remember when they unveiled um terminal, like people were going nuts in the audience, like it was genuine. It wasn't like Microsoft PR people screaming in the corner, you know? In a funny way, the world is coming around to Microsoft on that front, right? Like what we've seen is this giant push towards, you know, this is going to change the consumer landscape of everything. And then all of these AI companies kind of led by anthropic, but OpenAI has caught up really fast and Google is now on this too. They've all
realized that fundamentally this is business software and they're they're now trying to build it out as business software. And it feels like this is the thing that Microsoft in theory is very good at and is actually perfectly suited to capture is this idea of how do we bake AI into your business processes. Like no company is better set up to do that at scale than Microsoft. And I just got this sense of like you and I have talked many times about Microsoft's inability to help itself from trying to be a consumer company. It feels like if ever Microsoft was just going to confidently get back to being a business company, this is the time like it and it has a real shot at catching up very quickly if it can pull it off.
Yeah, that's the thing like it's almost like an existential crisis, isn't it, for Microsoft because if they don't pull this off, they have, you know, Office and Windows and all of this enterprise um platform stuff like M365, etc., but that could all just disappear, right? Like it's it's not a guaranteed business anymore. um in this era where a startup can just create something that just takes all of that away. But that's that's what it's all about. They need to capture that audience that they already have on the enterprise and get them using their own tools before they, you know, run off to use some someone else's. And there's been obviously friction internally with the Open Eye stuff where they've been
competing. They've been on this weird path where they're sort of trying to get the same sort of customers. Um, and I think it's, yeah, if there's ever a time where they need to make this work, it's it's right now for sure. I do want to talk about the sort of one consumer thing going at Microsoft right now, which is Xbox. Uh, I've been meaning to have you on for a while to talk about the current state of Xbox because there's a lot changing really fast. Uh, we're about 3 months or so into the Asha Sharma run at the top of Xbox after this giant shakeup. Uh, Xbox is now Xbox all caps, which I hate with every fiber of my being. I was going to say we have to say Xbox or just shout it.
Yeah, it's the Xbox team now. Um, give me the readout so far. What are how what are the vibes like? How are we feeling about the Asha Sharma era at Xbox so far? Yeah, I think at the moment it's it's still early days, right? But she's doing all the right things, right, as you would want to do to focus on the fans, right? She's trying to win back that sort of set of um people initially. Um, so I think she's setting up this like feedback framework so that fans can be like, "Oh, we want this." Which is predominantly we want exclusives back. That's the main message from fans, which is not too surprising, I guess. And also dropping the Microsoft gaming um name
that they used internally. Um, all that sort of stuff does kind of put it back the focus on Xbox and I think it's more important for employees really. I've heard over the last two years that people have been, you know, pretty upset with Xbox and working there and stuff. Um, a lot of folks, but I think that is starting to slowly turn. Um, so the people that were saying a lot of that to me are now saying, "Well, there's a little bit of hope, you know." Um, like Asha gets it. She's listening to the right people. Um and she has obviously um Satia Nadella and Amy Hood the CFO um have obviously given her a bit of runway like a bit of leeway to sort of not have that those
strict margins which I think undermine Xbox the last couple of years. Um so she's got a bit more free reign to perhaps do some stuff. Yeah. Give me your sense of what that looks like and kind of what the what the road is sort of pointing to. She's done a lot of very smart work cleaning up branding, right? like getting rid of Microsoft gaming and just calling it Xbox. Extremely good idea. And there is definitely a sort of simplification of what Microsoft is doing here. I can't quite figure out if her vision for what gamers do and this sort of like everything is an Xbox where Game Pass is the future, streaming is the
future, consoles don't really matter, every game should be everywhere. like Phil Spencer's idea of what it meant to be a gamer was very different than a lot of people have had. Is your sense that Asharma is going to change that in a meaningful way or just kind of focus in that same direction? Yeah, that's the big question is like a lot of the strategy stuff is sounds a lot like it was before, right? Play, you know, playing everywhere. So, it's not too dissimilar. Um, I think it's just more that the way they executed that before, like they did this is an Xbox and it was like a phone and a laptop. It's like the average consumer is going to look at that commercial and go, "Huh?" Like that's not an Xbox
and Xbox goes underneath my TV. So, so they still have that um that sort of perception to get over if they want to make the cloud stuff work and all that sort of stuff. But I think it's more the execution now. Um that's going to be a bit different on the strategy. I think we're still waiting to hear a little bit more clearer from Asher on the strategy. I mean, that's one thing that's probably been lacking somewhat. Um, and it cuz it's been more like the obvious things like fixing the branding she's doing at the moment, right? So, um, but it's like that's that's the right way to spend your first 90 days is just doing a lot of things that didn't make sense that now you making them make sense.
That goes a very long way. Yeah, it's been rapid, but like yeah, it does like you probably what you're about to say is what's the long-term strategy, right? Like what where does this at some point you have to tell me what I'm going to buy from you, right? Like that's that I don't know that I have tons of clarity on that question. No. And you've got Project Helix, their nextG console that's kind of like looming in the background there. But then Ash is doing a bunch of console work, like doing a lot of console features. So why would you spend engineer time doing all that sort of stuff if you're going to dump that sort of OS at some point and just go to some sort of Windows um with Xbox on top and
there's a lot of open questions um about the future for sure. Microsoft seems to be clearly turned back toward the Xbox a little bit, right? I think we spend a long time asking like is this even worth being an ongoing concern inside of Microsoft as it pivots away to being a different kind of company? It does seem to me that there is all this going on and it is increasingly far away from everything else that Microsoft talks about which is essentially just AI. Like Microsoft believes itself to be an AI powerhouse with a sort of not middling but not like massively successful gaming company on the side. Yeah.
Does it do you feel like those things can coexist? Are they going to coexist in Microsoft? It's it's always been the trouble with exports like the way it was first, you know, the way it started initially was an incubation project, right? So, right um and trying to put a you windows in delivery essentially. It's always been this weird thing at Xbox, but I think they've had the realization um over the past year or so that this is their last sort of major consumerf facing brand, right? like Surface is still, you know, got a foot in the consumer side, but it's still primarily they're selling those devices to business businesses to be honest. So, there's that realization that they need to like not
be so focused on the margins which is kind of caused them to do weird things over the past couple of years. Um, and sort of return of Xbox is always it's Xbox is always back, you know what I mean? like it's somehow it's always coming back. I don't know where it went. This meme the Xbox fans. It's like a graph and it's like this and it's like we're so back and then oh we're doomed. We're so back. that's exactly right. That's Yeah, that's Xbox. Um all right, one more thing before I let you go. Uh back to build. There was a lot of talk all week about the Nvidia RTX Spark stuff. And I think the sort of flagship hardware we've
seen so far has been from Microsoft. They had the Surface Laptop Ultra. They have this new uh Spark Dev box. What do you make here of Microsoft's hardware ambitions with Nvidia? What's going on here? Yeah, I was quite surprised to see them do both of these devices. I think we kind of assumed they do a laptop, right? and all the rumors of Nvidia's AI chips. Um, so yeah, I'm I'm I played around with the laptop Ultra. Um, and it is pretty much a 16-inch MacBook Pro, you know, like is it is a MacBook Pro and then and you know that they've done like the Surface Book in the past with the detachable display.
They've done the laptop studio where it's kind of lays flat into like a tablet. They've done all these quirky things. Um, but it looks like they're just kind of going back to the laptop formula cuz that works. Um, but I think the most curious thing about them is the who they're targeting, right? They're really going for developers and creators with these, which they kind of tried a little bit Windows 10 creators update. They briefly sort of sced with that. Um, but this seems like a good time to have these sort of devices. I think they struck like almost the perfect time. It's whether they can be good enough to be able to do everything the developers want to do um without having to touch those sort of cloud um cloud
powered models. But um I think that's the most interesting part of these devices to me is exactly how performant are they and exactly how well these local AI models were run. Yeah. For I have absolutely no professional need for the Surface Laptop Ultra and yet I still found myself I've loved the Surface Laptop since all the way back to like the Red Alcantara days. I thought that was a great laptop and that Microsoft should have put more into it. So, the idea of like an outrageously overpowered high-end Surface laptop gets me very excited. I'm sure it's going to cost a million dollars. I have no need for it,
but I'm thrilled that it exists. I swear that thing is going to start at $3,000. But, but I'm the same. I'm like, I don't need it, but I want it. Yeah, agreed. All right, Tom, get home safe. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on, Ben. Appreciate it. All right, I'll speak you soon. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Tom for being here, and thank you as always for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, feelings, questions, feedback, strong opinions about co-pilot, I want to hear all of it.
Email us vergecastthege.com or call the Vergecast hotline at 866 Verge11. We read it all, we listen to it all. We love hearing from you. As always, a reminder, the best thing you can do to support everything The Verge is up to and get all of our podcasts ad free is subscribe to The Verge. Theverge.com/subscribe. You get all of our podcasts with no ads. You get all of our exclusive newsletters. You get all of our coverage of everything. It's a pretty good website. I think you'll like it. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kefir, Travis Larch, and Aaron Lucasio. We will see you tomorrow.
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