Microsoft Build 2026 Kicks Off Today

Microsoft's developer conference opened this morning in San Francisco with Satya Nadella's keynote. Key announcements for engineers: the MAI model family is launching publicly (MAI-Code-1 targets GitHub Copilot and benchmarks at or above Claude 3.7 Sonnet on SWE-bench at lower inference cost), MAI-Thinking-1 is Microsoft's first dedicated reasoning model, and a unified Windows AI SDK bundles ONNX Runtime + DirectML into a single NuGet package. The strategic story: Microsoft is building end-to-end AI infrastructure and actively reducing OpenAI dependency. For devs, watch the GitHub Copilot and Azure AI Foundry session tracks.

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Sources: Microsoft Build 2026 · Notebookcheck Preview · Windows Forum: MAI Models