Microsoft showcases new PC, cloud AI tools at developer conference
SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft on Tuesday kicked off its annual Build developer conference in San Francisco, showcasing a new computer called the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box loaded with an Nvidia chip.
In an onstage keynote, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, said the forthcoming computer was a “dream machine.” There is a wait list to buy the computer and Nadella said he is on it, too.
Microsoft executives are expected to outline how the technology company plans to compete in the cloud, where it is both an investor and a rival to firms such as OpenAI, and increasingly on PCs.
Those laptop and desktop computers are becoming home to tools such as OpenClaw, a piece of open-source software that can direct groups of AI bots called agents to carry out everyday tasks for users.
But OpenClaw, which has gained popularity in China and helped rival Apple sell Mac computers, and other such tools are also risky for most businesses to use.
Analysts expect Microsoft to work on making such agentic AI tools safer for businesses and the world’s 1 billion users of its Windows operating system to use regularly.
They also expect more details on how Microsoft will let developers tap a new Nvidia chip, unveiled on Monday, to help bring AI directly to PCs. The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box follows a laptop that Microsoft introduced with Nvidia this week, and Microsoft executives showed it running an AI model with 120 billion parameters — a rough measure of a model’s complexity — that most PCs would not be able to load.
The chip will go into laptops priced to compete with Apple’s premium offerings, and its release helped boost shares of both Microsoft and major PC makers such as Dell Technologies, though analysts said it may take time for businesses to adopt the new machines.
Analysts also expect Microsoft to provide updates on its own AI models, using which it aims to compete in fields such as code completion with OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code.