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

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

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.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Microsoft Build is satisfying for a number of reasons. They're in the foundation model game. They train a bunch of models. MAI, Code 1 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 gotta be efficient.

Microsoft Scout is an agent, they're OpenClaw Pilled now. Powered by OpenClaught, OpenSource 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. 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 a Gentic 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. 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. models that are all going to run on Windows inbox.

Okay, let's jump to eight minutes because this is where Satcha introduces Project Solara, which Ben Thompson said, Project Solarara is, to be very clear, vaporware at this point, although the company did show real devices and has signed up Qualcomm and Media Tech as chip partners. It's also extremely compelling, so Ben Thompson likes it. Let's listen to Sotan Adele introduce it. 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 media tech silicon. Concept cars with Hello for business just walking up to the device securely signs you in, giving you direct access to your agents. And Amazon and Google Home have similar products at this point with screens for more smart home? 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. It's still tricky to imagine when you wouldn't want to use your phone for this. Since people carry the 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. This is a very interesting thing. It's not a phone. It looks more like a smart key card. badge. Yeah, it even has a space on it. Like it's a badge that you'd wear.

I tap to unlock the device and I've 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 post. Sorry if I missed it. Why would you want this over having an application? On your phone? I'm not sure. Yes, thank you. That's a good question. Does anyone have an answer? There's a There's a new meme, the two-phone meme. Yeah. Maybe some people feel left out.

They want a second device. 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. 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 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. 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. one of those devices, but when it comes to agents, it shouldn't be the hub because it's too locked out. He says, again, this is vaporware, and it's very much in Microsoft's interest. 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 an enterprise scenario where all of the context and compute is already in the cloud, and Project Solar 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 gonna 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 thinest client, you can have. It's 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 lapse 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, they 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. Has anybody been running down making a smart AI-enabled cowboy hat? That'd be a good one. You potentially have a lot of room up here for onboard some local view. Potentially. Maybe you could build a Starlink into it.

I feel like you would not wear the smart cowboy hat. Just frying your brain with the Mac Mini on your head. You're going to be against that. There's no way you're picking that up. Alex Heath, friend of the show, summed up the embrace of OpenClaw. a post. Scout is what it's called at Microsoft's first proactive AI agent for co-pilot buried the news that Sachin Adele is fully embracing OpenClaw. When Scout is released more widely this summer, it 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 OpenClaught sort of saw the rough edges, and we saw this with the meta-AI, the Instagram account theft that was going on. You can imagine. that if you have something that's as powerful as OpenClaught, but still constrained within your Microsoft ecosystem, 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 OpenClaught 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 with OpenClawn's initial buzz driving a surge in Mac Mini purchases, it's highly unlikely Apple will create a white glove experience for Microsoft, for OpenClaugh like Microsoft has with Scout. One of the primary beneficiaries, the OpenClaw, boom, in terms of their MacMini. They really did sell out. They really have sold out all over the place. But not going to embrace it. Yeah. They just don't have the enterprise motion necessarily. Well, that, that, but also the security, privacy.

Yeah. But WWC is next week, and who knows? Maybe we will see an open-claw competitor. Maybe we will see something that's, you know, a great leap forward for Apple in the AI and the Apple intelligence feature set. I don't know. I'm, 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 warm its way into every other app like OpenClaw has. So there's 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.

a MAG7 CEO is debunking water usage fears. The quote was, in fact, the daily water usage over the course of the entire years, 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 co-pilot super app that will sit alongside all of the Microsoft apps.

Microsoft is still not at the frontier, according to Alex Heat. says it didn't make a big deal out of the benchmarks for its new family of models. There were other comps. They were comping it to older models for 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? Yeah, I think the interesting comparison here is not with the Frontier Labs, but I think with meta, right? Because they had Muse Spark pretty recently. The thinking model, like, MAA thinking one, is actually quite competitive with the 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 yeah at Microsoft but like meta you hear like over and over they went through all this is this crazy talent wars and Nat Freeman Daniel Gross Alex Wong you know you've so many people that have like you know have done podcast to have ORA and have clout in the industry coming together not to mention like the actual researchers that they recruited yeah so it's interesting that they're actually like these are these are pretty solid models the researchers would actually more important than Yeah, 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 that 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. So I feel like I would get one percent of the benefit of that. You've got to be all in on that ecosystem. You've got to be all in.

I've been pushing your chips in. For sure, for sure. We will keep tracking that. What else is going on? Okay, live reading, reacting thread from StoCasm. There's a ton to go through. on MAI thinking. Was there anything interesting in this thread? Stochasm 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 Open AI for training, and they have access to the models. But one of the things that kept coming up in this presentation is that Microsoft is sort of touting like a very clean pre-training data set 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 Open AI lawsuit,

Elon was on the stand and mentioned that he might have, or XAI folks might have done some distillation on either Anthropic or Open AI models at one point. And so that was sort of like not the cleanest thing and might lead to problems down the road. Microsoft's 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 companies to be able to fine-tune these models, slightly different than what. what Amazon does. Amazon does mid-training. They give you a checkpoint of the pre-trained, and then you can add data that is relevant to your business and fine-tune it from a mid-training checkpoint checkpoint. 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 deploy it on the same hardware and you know it's going to run, you know how much it's going to cost. Burtoken, 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 agenetic commerce could be big because if you get hit with like a $500 million bill for your Agenic AI, you might not, it might be over the wire limit. So you might need to use, 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? For all the, for all the people getting hit with half a billion dollar bills. It happens. Joe Wisenthal 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.

Lee Ning, of course, signed a shoe endorsement contract with... Golden State Warrior Star Staff 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 bigger. No, that's a big... Chinese companies have acquired, you know, a bunch of brands like Arcterics, things like that. Yeah.

And the next step is to actually get meaningful... What is the best Chinese... Chinese consumer brand in America, the one that Americans like the most that comes from China. It's got to be DJI, right? Yep. Dron, videographer, wedding photos. Bernie was using, like. Bernie was using a-

I know it's a controversial company because people see it as industrial capacity. But if you're just like, 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? Every product on Amazon that has a name that...

Yeah, but that's not... I was going to 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 hyper car for $20,000, like, do they make over there? Kimu or Shin?

Are those, like, really loved brands in the same way... Marketplace. DJI feels a lot closer to, like, a Nike brand or an Apple brand than Sheen. or Timu. Timu seems more like a Walmart brand. I agree with you. It's popular.

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 A.I. It's not fully transformer-based,

but they're creating a whole bunch of different pieces of the pie and they remix them. Let's play it. other like slabs. Look at this. And we're able to randomize that at runtime when you're playing. Three slabs on the map. They randomize them every time you load it in the map.

That is 100. 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, ten times. You're like, I get it.

I know all the places. That never fades with Kill Block. I see this as an existential risk. I think this might be the end of TBPN. 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. I don't know.

I keep coming back to Rust. Yeah? If it ain't broke, don't fix it? I'm so happy. Like Rust, for me, is like a vacation destination that you have so many good memories. Yeah, you don't want it remixed. 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. He's a Luddite. He's a Luddite, folks. Anyway, there's one more announcement we've got to share. Andrew and NASCAR are teaming up to sell a $14,000 VR racing rig simulator. Palmer Lucky's back in the VR business. 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... Really, three days after I just put down a deposit on my own sense. Really? Yeah. Did you actually? Yeah. No way. But I don't think that's going to be, that's going to be very specific, I imagine. Yeah. For I imagine NASCAR simulation, right? Because that's where they're focused. But very, very cool. Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare says, well, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027 than 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. That's crazy. Bots are now, according to Cloudflare, 57.5%. 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 Glyman. 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, post the journals, fully 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. These one-off experiments... Such a common, boys. I love Eric doing the VL. It's great. One secure place to orchestrate AI co-operative.

for accounting from day one. 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 like pitching this exact thing since, what, 2020, 2019? And working on it longer, honestly. You go back to Paris.

And it learns over time. Always giving you the final say before anything gets posted. And every action it takes is fully recorded. and auditable. The more you build, the lighter the work gets, and the more clients you can take on. Stack. Ramstack.

They're saying it's God mode. It's God mode for encounters. 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 have alluded to it earlier. I saw this on Instagram,

and I really enjoyed it 30 seconds of Martin Scorsese stories. filmmaker. Jordy, name your favorite Martin Scorsesee movie. It doesn't feel

modern. A town, not a village, not a city. Mafia, the movie mafia. Isn't there? Is it a godfather?

There is a movie. Isn't it? The godfather? No, that's a... I am. You're thinking the Irishman,

maybe. That is like a mafia movie. Gangs of New York. No, that one. That one. Or maybe casino

or Goodfellas. Goodfellas. Good fellows. Anyway, play this. Sorry, I was not paying attention. Let's try it, and we'll go from what you think. You need a place that doesn't feel modern. A town, not a village, not a city. Almost medieval, even the streets are narrower, cobblestone. The main road through the town is twisting and turning. Put the camera higher looking down.

DeMille would have his production designers to oil paintings. This is that, in a sense, conveys a cinematic, a cinematic intelligence. Cinematic intelligence is a good tagline for Black Forest Labs. I thought that was really, really good. What a way to, like, you know, hammer. Obviously, I'm filmmaking, deeply controversial, but you get Martin Scorsese talking about it, and he's at least going to perk up people's ears,

and they're going to listen to what he has to say. And think about it, is it a tool? Could it be useful in a workflow? Could it speed something up? Is it going to 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. Sharp. And leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts. And Spotify, sign up for our newsletter, TBPN.com. And we will see you tomorrow. We love you. Have a good evening. Goodbye.