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Microsoft Takes on Frontier AI Labs at Build 2026

June 3, 2026

Happy Wednesday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is the drama surrounding CBS firing longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

Today’s lineup

Suno Co-Founder Mikey Shulman at 11:15 AM
Podcast Host Samir Chaudry at 11:45 AM
Bullish CEO Tom Farley at 12:00 PM
Palo Alto Networks Chairman & CEO Nikesh Arora at 12:30 PM
Privy Co-Founder & CEO Henri Stern at 12:50 PM
Post Fiat Founder Alexander Good at 1:05 PM

Run of ShowAlamy

Microsoft Takes on Frontier AI Labs at Build 2026

Microsoft’s annual developer conference Build concludes today. So far, the company has announced a number of new artificial intelligence initiatives. These include:

MAI-Code-1-Flash and MAI-Thinking-1, the company’s first coding and reasoning models, respectively, which several speakers played up as super efficient on a cost-per-token basis
Microsoft Scout, an agent 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, email, calendar, and contacts” (OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger even made a surprise appearance at the conference)
The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s Mac mini
And a new Android-based OS designed to run agents instead of apps called Project Solara

The Verge interpreted the spread of these releases as Microsoft positioning itself to compete with the major AI labs, fresh off its late-April breakup from OpenAI. The Verge cited an interview it did with AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, where he said:

“The goal is to prove that we can become one of the top four labs in the world. There’s three labs that matter, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We are not one of them at the moment, and that’s always been my intention. It’s why I came here. I want to build the very best frontier models in the world, fully multimodal, and in order to do that, we have to prove that we can do everything that we need to from the ground up, and we’re not just going to take from others.” [...]
“[T]he pivotal moment was renegotiating our contract with OpenAI. That meant that we were allowed to train models at a larger scale and explicitly pursue superintelligence entirely with our own IP, with our own data, no distillation, training from scratch.”

Onstage at Build, Satya also said:

“We believe the time has come for every company to just move from consuming a frontier model to fully participating at the frontier in the frontier ecosystem.”

In other news, AI market intelligence platform AlphaSense just raised $350M at a $7.5B valuation, which is nearly double its valuation from its last round in 2024. Led by former Wall Street analyst Jack Kokko, AlphaSense allows its clients to talk to industry experts and search through tons of financial documents and data sources. Charlie Zvibleman, AlphaSense’s VP of Finance, also announced the launch of SuperAnalyst, the company’s new agentic platform. In Q1 2026 AlphaSense did over $600M ARR, up from $500M in Q3 2025.

— Brandon

Clip Spotlight: Gusto ships AI Cofounder

Gusto cofounder Edward Kim said that yesterday was the most important day in Gusto’s history since launch.

They had just shipped Gusto Cofounder, an AI agent that you talk to through texting and Slack that automates almost everything a small business does in its back office.

He explained:

“We start with all the problems that we’re already helping our customers with — payroll, benefits, HR, scheduling — then we bring on a lot of the power of AI into it.”

“You tell us what your business processes are, starting with payroll, benefits, and all these things we’re already doing for you. And Gusto Cofounder will basically run your business process for you.”

“You communicate with it through SMS and Slack. You don’t really even interface with it through a website.”

“And we connect to all the systems that you’re using outside of Gusto as well. Notion, QuickBooks, Google Workspace... Gusto Cofounder brings it all together into one place where it automates your business processes.”

Headlines

The Verge: Microsoft Build 2026: The 7 biggest announcements

FT: Microsoft targets Anthropic with new model releases

The Verge: Microsoft and OpenAI broke up — now they’re ready to fight

Alex Heath on 𝕏: Microsoft embraces OpenClaw

WSJ: Market-Research Firm AlphaSense Clinches $7.5 Billion Valuation in New Funding Round

Bloomberg: DeepSeek Close to Sealing $7 Billion Funding in Historic AI Deal

Google releases Gemma 4 12B, a multimodal model designed to run locally

Google upsizes its $80B raise to $85B

Suno raises $400M in Series D funding at a $5.4B valuation led by Bond Capital

Cognition introduces Devin Desktop

Ramp introduces Stack, an AI operating system for accounting firms