Microsoft Build event in 15 minutes

The Verge

Microsoft just wrapped its annual Build conference for 2025. The focus this year: AI agents. We got a look at the open agentic web, new CoPilot updates, Linux is now open-source, and the company also confirmed it’s expanding its Azure AI Foundry models list to include Elon Musk’s Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini from xAI. Plus, we hear from OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia's Jensen Huang. Here’s everything you missed

Transcript

00:00Good morning and welcome to Build.

00:03We have a bunch of new updates we are rolling out at Build,

00:06starting with Visual Studio.

00:08It is the most powerful IDE for .NET and C++,

00:12and we're making it even better.

00:14.NET 10 support,

00:16a live preview at design time,

00:18improvements to Git tooling,

00:20a new debugger for cross-platform apps,

00:23and much, much more.

00:25And we're moving, by the way,

00:27a new cadence for stable releases as well.

00:30And when it comes to VS Code,

00:32just a couple of weeks ago,

00:34we shipped a hundredth release in the open.

00:39It included improved multi-window support

00:42and made it easier to view stage directly

00:46from within the editor.

00:48And GitHub continues to be the home for developers.

00:52GitHub Enterprise has tremendous momentum

00:55in the enterprise.

00:58And we're doubling down for developers

01:00building any applications.

01:02Trust, security, compliance, auditability,

01:07data residency are even more critical today.

01:11Now, starting with tools you use

01:14to the infrastructure you deploy on

01:17to reach the users and the markets you want.

01:21You know, talking about trust,

01:24open source is at the core of GitHub.

01:29And we're taking this next big step.

01:33As GitHub Copilot has evolved inside VS Code,

01:37AI has become so central to how we code.

01:41And that's why we're open sourcing Copilot in VS Code.

01:45We're really excited about this.

01:47Starting today, we will integrate these AI-powered capabilities

01:54directly into the core of VS Code,

01:57bringing them into the same open source repo

02:00that powers the world's most loved dev tool.

02:05And the next thing we're introducing

02:07is an autonomous agent for Site Reliability Engineering,

02:11or SRE.

02:12This is the next big step forward,

02:14which is a full coding agent built right into GitHub,

02:20taking Copilot from being a pair programmer

02:24to a peer programmer.

02:25You can assign issues to Copilot, bug fixes,

02:30new features, code maintenance,

02:33and it will complete these tasks autonomously.

02:36And today, I'm super excited that it's now available to all of you.

02:42You know, here I am with all the bugs that I have

02:46or issues that I have to deal with in GitHub issues.

02:50The first one is adding a filter for user group size,

02:56community page.

02:57Let's go take a look at this issue.

02:59It's nice.

03:00They say, like, I've got to go put some new filter up here.

03:04It also shows me where.

03:06Let's do the thing that I can do,

03:08which is assign it to my new buddy, Copilot.

03:11So I'm going to assign it.

03:13And there you go.

03:16Let's go and see.

03:18Let me scroll down.

03:20Ah! It's picked it up.

03:24It sees me.

03:25It creates a PR.

03:27And, you know, you see that nice eye emoji.

03:31It sort of knows that I'm here,

03:32and it's sort of going on to work.

03:34And we'll come back and check it out later.

03:36Today, we're introducing a new class of enterprise-grade agents

03:40you can build using models fine-tuned

03:44on your company's data, workflows, and style.

03:48We call it Copilot Tuning.

03:51This is about really not just using Copilot,

03:54but it's about tuning Copilot for every customer,

03:58every enterprise, every firm.

04:00You know, Copilot can now learn your company's unique tone

04:04and language, and soon it'll even go further understanding

04:08all of the company's specific expertise and knowledge.

04:11All you need to do is seed the training environment

04:15with a small set of references and kick off a training run.

04:18The customized model inherits the permissions

04:22of all the source control.

04:24And once integrated into the agent,

04:27it can deploy to authorized users, right?

04:30So you can sort of go to groups that you've set up

04:33and distribute it across Copilot.

04:35Think of Foundry like a production line for intelligence.

04:40You know, we already support 1,900 models,

04:44whether they're response models, reasoning models,

04:47task-specific, multi-modal, you name it.

04:50They're all there in Foundry.

04:52But, you know, still, picking a model can be a bit of a chore,

04:56and you need to be able to route your queries

04:58to the right one fast.

05:00And so we are making that easier, too.

05:02Our new model router will automatically choose

05:05the best OpenAI model for the job.

05:07No more sort of those, you know, manual model selections.

05:11That's why today we are thrilled to announce

05:15Grok from XAI is coming to Azure.

05:22So, basically, the focus of Grok 3.5 is

05:26sort of a fundamental source of physics

05:30and applying physics tools across all lines of reasoning.

05:34And to aspire to truth with minimal error.

05:39Like, there's always going to be some mistakes that are made,

05:42but we aim to get to truth with acknowledged error,

05:48but minimize that error over time.

05:50And I think that's actually extremely important for AI safety.

05:55So I've thought a lot for a long time about AI safety,

05:58and my ultimate conclusion is the old maxim that honesty is the best policy.

06:03Yeah.

06:04It really is for safety.

06:06Thank you so much, Ilan, for briefly joining us today.

06:09And we're really excited about working with you

06:11and getting this into the developers' hands.

06:13Thank you very much.

06:14And I can't emphasize enough that we're looking for feedback

06:17from you, the developer audience.

06:19Tell us what you want, and we'll make it happen.

06:23I was at LamaCon recently with Mark, and you know, as he likes to say,

06:26he's bringing the full herd of Lama, the full Lama herd to Azure.

06:31We're excited about all the advances that they're making in open source,

06:34Black Forest Labs, and many more, right?

06:37So all of them.

06:38And we also have expanded our partnership with Hugging Face.

06:41So you'll have access to over 11,000 frontier

06:45and open source models in Foundry.

06:47But, you know, models are just part of the equation.

06:50You really need, like, a database or a knowledge engine,

06:55a real query engine that's custom-built for agents.

07:00And the Foundry agent service lets you build declarative agents,

07:05in fact, just with a few lines of code just in the portal.

07:09For complex workflows, it supports multi-agent orchestration.

07:13And I'm excited to share that now the agent service

07:16is generally available.

07:18With Entra ID, agents now get their own identity permissions,

07:24policies, access controls.

07:26The agents you build in Foundry and Copilot Studio show up automatically

07:31in an agent directory in Entra.

07:33This is Vibe Travel, a chat-based app that uses Azure AI Foundry

07:38to provide an AI travel agent to help people plan their trips.

07:42I'm planning a trip to New Zealand in about eight months,

07:45so I asked Vibe for places to ski.

07:48Hmm, this math isn't mathing.

07:51I'm pretty sure eight months from now is January 2026.

07:55We definitely need to make our AI agents smarter

07:58and give more grounded responses.

08:01We can do this by giving it files with reference data

08:04or connections to other services like Microsoft Fabric or TripAdvisor.

08:09In addition to giving it access to knowledge,

08:12we also give it access to our flight reservation API.

08:15Now, let's go back to our app and try our query again.

08:19In about eight months, it's January 2026,

08:23which is the summer season.

08:25No skiing possible.

08:27Now, when I click this reset button in the app,

08:31it immediately clears our chat session without a warning.

08:34That's not ideal, and I can ask GitHub Copilot

08:38to help me implement the details for issue number one

08:41and also fetch the details for issue number one.

08:44I also have this beautiful design.

08:47It's pretty sweet, wouldn't you say?

08:50Let me add this to the context window and send the prompt.

08:54You can see the GitHub MCP server fetch the details,

08:57and with Agent Mode's new vision capabilities,

09:00it means that Copilot can even understand the sketches of what I want.

09:05Copilot Agent Mode was able to examine the proposed changes,

09:08look for relevant files to change, make the changes as appropriate,

09:13and it even stuck to the styles and coding standards that I wanted it to.

09:17When I go back to the app,

09:19it was able to implement the UI changes that my boss wanted.

09:23Let me see if it's running.

09:28Let's hit keep.

09:30As you can see, folks, this is live.

09:33I don't have time to debug,

09:39but once I click this issue, I'm pretty sure it's implemented.

09:43Copilot was able to add the modal in our app,

09:46and that's two issues that we worked on in a handful of minutes.

09:50Thank you, GitHub Copilot and Azure AI Foundry.

09:54Let's take a look at the issue that he assigned earlier.

09:57Do you remember it?

09:58To add that group size filter to the site,

10:00and Copilot was able to open up a pull request

10:03to start implementing these changes.

10:05So let's take a look at the deployment.

10:07Fingers crossed.

10:09And you can see the group size filter was added.

10:16We're excited to announce the Windows AI Foundry.

10:20And now we're extending this platform to support the full dev life cycle,

10:25right?

10:26Not just on Copilot PCs, but across CPUs, GPUs, NPUs,

10:30all and in the cloud, right?

10:32So you can build your application and have them run across all of that silicon.

10:37We're announcing native support for MCP in Windows.

10:44Windows will now include several built-in MCP servers,

10:48like file systems, settings, app actions, as well as windowing.

10:52We first announced Bash on Ubuntu on Windows nearly 10 years ago.

10:59It subsequently became what we obviously call, you know, today WSL.

11:05Today we are making WSL fully open source.

11:09The super exciting thing that we really want to talk about here at this build

11:16is our real serious commitment to MCP.

11:21We can get into all sorts of arguments,

11:24and I know you all are perfectly capable of this,

11:27as am I, as engineers, like where you've got really sharp opinions

11:31about pieces of technology and like, you know,

11:34this thing's a little bit better than that thing.

11:36But what's better than all of that is like just getting something standard

11:40that we can all use and build on top of,

11:42and like we hope that thing is MCP.

11:44So we're announcing today, and you all should go check out the code

11:47in the GitHub repo, NLWeb.

11:49And the idea behind NLWeb is it is a way for anyone who has a website

11:55or an API already to very easily make their website or their API

12:02an agentic application.

12:04And because every NLWeb endpoint is by default an MCP server,

12:09it means that those things that people are offering up via NLWeb

12:15will be accessible to any agent that speaks MCP.

12:18So you really can think about it a little bit like HTML for the agentic web.

12:23We're integrating Cosmos DB directly into Foundry.

12:27So that means any agent can store and retrieve things like conversational history,

12:33and soon they'll be able to also use Cosmos for all their RAG application needs.

12:41Last fall, we put SQL into Fabric,

12:44and today we're taking the next big step.

12:47We're bringing Cosmos DB to Fabric too, right?

12:50Because AI apps need more than just structured data.

12:54They need semi-structured data, whether it's text, images, audio.

12:58And with Cosmos and Fabric and your data instantly available,

13:02alongside SQL, you can now unify your entire data estate

13:07and make it ready for AI.

13:09Now, while our cloud offers this comprehensive coverage,

13:13there are still many critical use cases that need extreme low latency

13:17and explicit control where and how your apps and data are stored.

13:22And that means the ability to run things disconnected,

13:25and that's why we also offer Azure Local.

13:29Azure Local.

13:30But there's one more domain that I want to talk about to close out,

13:34which is science.

13:36We'll have real breakthroughs in the scientific process itself,

13:40which will really accelerate our ability to create, you know,

13:45a new material, a new compound, a new molecule.

13:48That's our ambition with Microsoft Discovery, which we are announcing today.

13:54Discovery is built on Foundry bringing advanced agents highly specialized in R&D,

14:01not just for reasoning, but for conducting research itself.

14:05These are the set of candidates that Microsoft Discovery has identified for PFAS-free immersion coolants.

14:12But I know what you're wondering.

14:14Did we actually make a Discovery?

14:16Well, this is not just a demo.

14:19We really did this.

14:21We took one of the most promising candidates and synthesized it.

14:25They didn't let me bring a new material unknown to humans onto this stage,

14:30but I've got this video from the lab.

14:33So we can see there my coolant, and we dropped a standard PC in it,

14:37and it's running Forza Motorsport.

14:40And it is keeping the temperature stable with no fans.

14:43It's literally very cool.

14:46So that was, you know, a quick, comprehensive, whatever you want to call it,

14:51walk through the full stack and how we're creating new opportunity for you across the agentic web.

14:59Thank you all very, very much.

15:01Enjoy the rest of Build.

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