This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we break down the news from Microsoft Build from Project Solara and the Scout agentic assistant to Microsoft’s push to rely less on OpenAI and Anthropic, and the mounting pressure on GitHub. Read More
Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock investor, will not stand for re-election to Microsoft’s board, ending a tenure that began in 2017. He told Satya Nadella he’s returning to “founder mode” to focus on his cancer drug-discovery startup, Manas AI. Read More
Microsoft used its Build conference to unveil seven in-house AI models, including a reasoning model it says draws even with Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 — part of a push to depend less on the AI partners it has invested billions in. Read More
At least 10 former Allen Institute for AI staffers and researchers have joined Microsoft’s Superintelligence team, including the core of the institute’s OLMo open-source model effort. The departures come amid a shift in Ai2’s funding toward applied uses of AI. Read More
Microsoft announced MAI-Transcribe-1, a new speech-to-text model, and made its in-house MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Image-2 models broadly available to developers for commercial use for the first time, expanding its proprietary AI capabilities beyond its OpenAI partnership. Read More
In her debut column for GeekWire, longtime Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley digs into the recent wave of reorgs, hiring freezes, and leadership shakeups in Redmond, and asks whether it’s business as usual or something bigger. Read More
Microsoft is hiring former Ai2 CEO Ali Farhadi, along with Hanna Hajishirzi and Ranjay Krishna from the Allen Institute for AI to join Mustafa Suleyman’s Superintelligence team, GeekWire has learned. Former Ai2 COO Sophie Lebrecht is also making the move. Read More
Microsoft is reorganizing its Copilot organization, unifying its consumer and commercial AI efforts under former Snap executive Jacob Andreou while narrowing the role of Microsoft AI leader Mustafa Suleyman to focus on superintelligence and frontier models. Read More
Computer scientist and entrepreneur Oren Etzioni shares his unvarnished take on AI agents, the platform race, OpenAI, deepfakes, and what good AI leadership looks like, during a conversation at an Accenture-hosted event in Bellevue. Read More
Microsoft has formed a new Superintelligence team, led by Mustafa Suleyman, to pursue what it calls “humanist superintelligence” — advanced AI that remains under human control. The effort reflects Microsoft’s bid to shape the next era of AI while emphasizing safety and restraint. Read More
Microsoft is rolling out a series of updates to its consumer Copilot AI assistant, including shared group chats, long-term memory, and an optional visual persona named Mico. Read More
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is handing off day-to-day commercial execution to longtime sales chief Judson Althoff, who takes on the new role of CEO of commercial business. The change frees Nadella to focus more on AI and long-term technology bets. Read More
Just as the PC and cloud defined much of Microsoft’s first 50 years, and just as its struggles in mobile set the company back in the smartphone era, its success or failure in AI promises to determine its fate for decades to come. Read More
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman — the entrepreneur, author, podcaster, venture capitalist and Microsoft board member — is on the front lines of… Read More
