Microsoft is doing things differently with AI. It feels to me they are moving into local inference heavily and see a future where Windows has native AI APIs that run locally or optionally in the cloud/edge.
That’s where Apple is moving to as well. The models doing the implementation work need not be better than opus 4.6. And locally available hardware to run this already exists and likely will be sub 2k of 2026 dollars in a few years time.
I hope they can finally make my "Copilot+ PC" infer things locally that are actually useful. Phi Silica for Advanced Paste was a good start, if a bit late. If they got their act together, Microsoft-Decision-1 could have some local potential. Their track record leaves me with some reservations.
Honestly, I'm glad that people later to the AI game are exploring niches other than state-of-the-art "smartest" models – I'd love AI applications that tackle the small hassles in life.
Yeah, because they are desperate to try and justify the investments into Copilot and the NPUs they pushed OEMs into integrating. I'm all for competition, but every one of MS's AI models have just been nothingburgers or relabels of other lab's models. Even their novel high cardinality models are just novelties.
This is based on one of the smaller Qwen models, just like Cloudflare's Clef, Strands decider, and a plethora of others released in the last couple of weeks.
Kind of funny how much hype they can all get out of this, but Qwen really is the little engine that could. Great to see open weights (if not open source) driving the whole ecosystem like this though.
> To build Microsoft-Decision-1, we post trained Qwen3.5-9B for fast, single-pass decision scoring and will soon rebase it on other models, including Microsoft AI (MAI) and OpenAI.
I guess the fear of Chinese models is finally subsiding.
While this looks like a contribution from a capable team trying to impress senior leadership, for me personally the Microsoft brand is so badly tarnished I don't even feel negative emotions any more - just pity.
Microsoft is doing things differently with AI. It feels to me they are moving into local inference heavily and see a future where Windows has native AI APIs that run locally or optionally in the cloud/edge.
Those local APIs already exist. It is called Microsoft Foundry Local: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry-local/get-st...
Supports GPU, NPU and CPU.
That’s where Apple is moving to as well. The models doing the implementation work need not be better than opus 4.6. And locally available hardware to run this already exists and likely will be sub 2k of 2026 dollars in a few years time.
I hope they can finally make my "Copilot+ PC" infer things locally that are actually useful. Phi Silica for Advanced Paste was a good start, if a bit late. If they got their act together, Microsoft-Decision-1 could have some local potential. Their track record leaves me with some reservations.
With Copilot+ PC branding already retired, I suspect we won't be seeing much more activity on that front.
Honestly, I'm glad that people later to the AI game are exploring niches other than state-of-the-art "smartest" models – I'd love AI applications that tackle the small hassles in life.
Yeah, because they are desperate to try and justify the investments into Copilot and the NPUs they pushed OEMs into integrating. I'm all for competition, but every one of MS's AI models have just been nothingburgers or relabels of other lab's models. Even their novel high cardinality models are just novelties.
This is based on one of the smaller Qwen models, just like Cloudflare's Clef, Strands decider, and a plethora of others released in the last couple of weeks.
Kind of funny how much hype they can all get out of this, but Qwen really is the little engine that could. Great to see open weights (if not open source) driving the whole ecosystem like this though.
> To build Microsoft-Decision-1, we post trained Qwen3.5-9B for fast, single-pass decision scoring and will soon rebase it on other models, including Microsoft AI (MAI) and OpenAI.
I guess the fear of Chinese models is finally subsiding.
There isn't much choice, I am afraid. is Chinese models or Gemma or Llama? (I am missing a few lesser known ones.)
I don't see any API documentation for this yet. How can someone actually try it? Did they rush this out for hype?
https://ai.azure.com/catalog/models/Microsoft-Decision-1
But what about when the government's AI skills amount to: "is this DEI, only answer yes or no"
While this looks like a contribution from a capable team trying to impress senior leadership, for me personally the Microsoft brand is so badly tarnished I don't even feel negative emotions any more - just pity.