The Streeam Deck Modules can be easily added to customized mounts and other projects.
Elgato announced a new “Stream Deck Everywhere” strategy at Computex, which includes a software-based virtual Stream Deck for PCs, an ethernet dock accessory, unbranded Stream Deck modules that can bring its keys into other products, and even new scissor-switch keys for a more precise, keyboard-like feel. “With these launches, we’re opening up Stream Deck to a world of new users, from developers and DIY builders to manufacturers seeking a field-proven interface for their products,” said Elgato general manager Julian Fest. “Because Stream Deck isn’t just a device—it’s a platform.
Stream Deck Modules are designed for hobbyists and manufacturers to easily integrate into hardware projects instead of ripping apart the consumer version or developing their own custom macropad solutions. The modules are available in 6-, 15-, and 32-key variants and are housed in an aluminum chassis that can be built into custom bases, machines, and furniture, making it possible to actually create Elgato’s ridiculous 1,262-key April Fools’ desk.
The Stream Deck Modules are available now starting at $49.99 for the six-key version, $129.99 for the 15-key, and $199.99 for the 32-key. Elgato technical marketing manager Philipp Eggebrecht told The Verge that discounts will be offered for bulk purchases.
A new variant of the MK.2 Stream Deck has been introduced that replaces the membrane keys with scissor-style switches that provide “enhanced speed and precision,” according to Elgato. Eggebrecht says the scissor keys variant costs $149.99 and will be available in “around two weeks.”
Stream Deck buttons that feel more like keyboard keys would make it easier for users to tell they’ve clicked something without having to look at the device. Elgato describes the scissor switch variant as something that “lends itself to typing-style interactions, paving the way for new use cases that benefit from rapid, multi-layered input and control,” which could be testing the waters for a Stream Deck keyboard or any other application requiring precise controls.
“The idea of a full LCD-key based keyboard is interesting. We’ve explored it in the past and so far, what we’ve found is that the experience hasn’t been great, and there’s the cost question,” Eggebrecht told The Verge. “We’re getting closer to a keyboard feeling with Stream Deck Scissor Keys, and always looking at the technology and what is becoming possible. Stream Deck and keyboards are a natural fit.”
Elgato is also rolling out a software-only Stream Deck for desktop devices, akin to the existing Stream Deck mobile app. The Virtual Stream Deck (VSD) can provide a permanent macro menu on computer screens or be summoned at will when users hit allocated hotkeys and mouse buttons. The VSD software will initially be available for people who own a Corsair Scimitar Elite Wireless SE mouse, Xenon Edge touchscreen, or any Stream Deck model, before later rolling out to “more devices.”
Custom layouts, virtual faceplates, and support for beyond six buttons require iPhone and Android Stream Deck users to pay for Pro access, which starts at $2.99 monthly or $49.99 as a one-time purchase. Eggebrecht says Elgato’s desktop VSD isn’t locked behind a subscription, but does require users to install the Stream Deck 7.0 beta.
A new $79.99 Stream Deck network dock accessory was also announced that includes support for power over Ethernet (PoE), which lets you place its buttons anywhere there’s a network jack, and with more flexibility than USB-C affords by itself. Eggebrecht says the Stream Deck network dock will start shipping in August.
It’s finally possible to purchase an audiobook from Spotify’s iPhone app with just a few taps. On Monday, Spotify announced that Apple approved an update that allows users in the US to see audiobook pricing within the app and buy individual audiobooks outside the App Store.
The update also lets Spotify Premium subscribers purchase additional audiobook listening hours. This change follows last month’s Epic Games vs. Apple ruling, which upended the iPhone maker’s control over the App Store. Under the ruling, Apple can’t collect fees on purchases made outside the app store, nor can it govern how developers point to external purchases.
Spotify submitted the update last week, but now it’s official. The music streaming service pulled audiobook purchases from its iOS app in 2022 after accusing Apple of “choking competition” with App Store rules that made it more difficult to purchase audiobooks. Spotify also started letting iPhone users purchase subscriptions outside the App Store earlier this month.
The iOS apps for Kindle, Patreon, and Delta’s emulator have also taken advantage of the court ruling, but Epic Games is still fighting to bring Fortnite back to the App Store. “This change lowers the barriers for more users to embrace their first — or tenth — audiobook, while allowing publishers and authors to reach fans and access new audiences seamlessly,” Spotify said in its announcement.
WizKids did Baldur’s Gate 3 dirty with its new D&D Icons of the Realms collection of miniature figures. The anticipated collection based on the beloved RPG (my personal 2023 GOTY) launched in April, and some buyers noticed that the characters look nothing — and I mean nothing — like how they were advertised. These cursed recreations of Shadowheart, Astarion, Karlach, Gale, Wyll, and Lae’zel look like unlicensed knockoffs when they are, in fact, officially licensed by Wizards of the Coast. And, it costs $50 for the set!
Anyone who has played the game, or at least seen its cover art numerous times, knows what these characters should look like. They don’t look like 3D-printed discards predestined for the garbage bin, with little to no effort made to look authentic, unless perhaps you’re squinting from 10 feet away.
In response to buyers posting pictures of the botched figures on social media and retail sites, and likely from GamesRadar and other sites posting about it last week, WizKids posted an apology to buyers — and to Wizards of the Coast. In it, it details how to get a refund or a replacement to anyone who bought them online or at a local games store. Keep them, replace them, destroy them, pray to them. It’s up to you.
SAG-AFTRA wrote in a statement that it understands its members and members’ estates wish to use AI technology in any way they choose. “However,” SAG-AFTRA’s statement continued, “we must protect our right to bargain terms and conditions around uses of voice that replace the work of our members, including those who previously did the work of matching Darth Vader’s iconic rhythm and tone in video games.”
While the AI “revolution” slowly replaces human workers with oftentimes inferior products, and despite some members’ distaste for the practice, SAG-AFTRA has embraced the idea of using AI trained to replicate an actor’s performance. It has established contracts and partnerships with several AI companies with the idea being members can use this technology with specific contract-guaranteed protections. So the act of using an AI to replace Darth Vader’s voice performers (both the late James Earl Jones and those brought in after his death to match his performance) isn’t what SAG-AFTRA is objecting to. Rather, it’s the fact that this was done without Epic Games sitting down with SAG-AFTRA at the bargaining table to hash out the specifics.
“Fortnite‘s signatory company, Llama Productions, chose to replace the work of human performers with AI technology,” SAG-AFTRA wrote. “Unfortunately, they did so without providing any notice of their intent to do this and without bargaining with us over appropriate terms.” The Verge has reached out to Epic Games for comment.
AI and its use in video game voice and motion performance is the main stumbling block in the ongoing video game voice actor strike. Negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the signatory companies of its interactive media agreement broke down last year, and performers have been on strike since July — a length of time that eclipses both the actors and writers strikes of 2023.
President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law, enacting a bill that will criminalize the distribution of nonconsensual intimate images (NCII) — including AI deepfakes — and require social media platforms to promptly remove them when notified.
The bill sailed through both chambers of Congress with several tech companies, parent and youth advocates, and first lady Melania Trump championing the issue. But critics — including a group that’s made it its mission to combat the distribution of such images — warn that its approach could backfire and harm the very survivors it seeks to protect.
The law makes publishing NCII, whether real or AI-generated, criminally punishable by up to three years in prison, plus fines. It also requires social media platforms to have processes to remove NCII within 48 hours of being notified and “make reasonable efforts” to remove any copies. The Federal Trade Commission is tasked with enforcing the law, and companies have a year to comply.
“I’m going to use that bill for myself, too”
Under any other administration, the Take It Down Act would likely see much of the pushback it does today by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which warn the takedown provision could be used to remove or chill a wider array of content than intended, as well as threaten privacy-protecting technologies like encryption, since services that use it would have no way of seeing (or removing) the messages between users. But actions by the Trump administration in his first 100 days in office — including breaching Supreme Court precedent by firing the two Democratic minority commissioners at the FTC — have added another layer of fear for some of the law’s critics, who worry it could be used to threaten or stifle political opponents. Trump, after all, said during an address to Congress this year that once he signed the bill, “I’m going to use that bill for myself, too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online. Nobody.”
The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), which advocates for legislation combating image-based abuse, has long pushed for the criminalization of nonconsensual distribution of intimate images (NDII). But the CCRI said it could not support the Take It Down Act because it may ultimately provide survivors with “false hope.” On Bluesky, CCRI President Mary Anne Franks called the takedown provision a “poison pill … that will likely end up hurting victims more than it helps.”
“Platforms that feel confident that they are unlikely to be targeted by the FTC (for example, platforms that are closely aligned with the current administration) may feel emboldened to simply ignore reports of NDII,” they wrote. “Platforms attempting to identify authentic complaints may encounter a sea of false reports that could overwhelm their efforts and jeopardize their ability to operate at all.”
In an interview with The Verge, Franks expressed concern that it could be “hard for people to parse” the takedown provision. “This is going to be a year-long process,” she said. “I think that as soon as that process has happened, you’ll then be seeing the FTC being very selective in how they treat supposed non-compliance with the statute. It’s not going to be about putting the power in the hands of depicted individuals to actually get their content removed.”
Trump, during his signing ceremony, dismissively referenced criticism of the bill. “People talked about all sorts of First Amendment, Second Amendment… they talked about any amendment they could make up, and we got it through,” he said.
Legal challenges to the most problematic parts may not come immediately, however, according to Becca Branum, deputy director of CDT’s Free Expression Project. “It’s so ambiguously drafted that I think it’ll be hard for a court to parse when it will be enforced unconstitutionally” before platforms have to implement it, Branum said. Eventually, users could sue if they have lawful content removed from platforms, and companies could ask a court to overturn the law if the FTC investigates or penalizes them for breaking it — it just depends on how quickly enforcement ramps up.
There's a lot to look at, watch, and listen to on the web. Fully utilizing the bookmarks feature in Google Chrome can be a real help in staying on top of everything.
Chrome is the browser I use most often, and I've got a huge number of bookmarked sites inside it: long reads I want to get back to once work is done, news updates to write up for work, gift ideas, apps I'd like to check out, important Slack channels, and content systems for my job… the list goes on. All synced between devices and available everywhere.
If you haven't done a deep dive into Chrome's bookmarks feature then you might not be aware of everything you can do with it, how it can save you time, and how you can bring some kind of order to your web browsing.
Saving bookmarks
The star icon to the right of the address bar in Chrome on the desktop is for saving new bookmarks. Click it and the current page gets saved to the most recently used bookmarks folder. You can also press Ctrl+D (Windows) or Cmd+D (macOS), which is even easier. On mobile, tap the three dots at the top then the star icon (Android), or the three dots at the bottom then Add to bookmarks (iOS) to save the current page as a new bookmark.
The app appears to offer similar functionality to the desktop version of NotebookLM, including the ability to upload sources of information that the app can summarize. It can also make AI-generated, podcast-like Audio Overviews. With the app, you can listen to those Audio Overviews in the background while you’re doing other things on your phone or while offline, Google says. Might be a handy way to get caught up on your performance review.
The company teased the launch of the mobile app for the AI-powered tool last month. Its official arrival is happening just ahead of Google I/O, which kicks off with the opening keynote at 1PM ET on Tuesday. It’s probably going to be an AI show.
Update, May 19th: The iOS app is now available, too.
Huawei just launched a super sleek folding laptop that might be as thin as your phone. The MateBook Fold, which consists of a single OLED display, is just 7.3mm (~0.3 inches) thick when unfolded and 14.9mm (~0.6 inches) when closed, as spotted earlier by Android Headlines.
To compare, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold measures 8.6mm (0.34 inches) thick unfolded and 17.4mm (0.68 inches) when folded. But unlike Lenovo’s device, the MateBook Fold is only available in China for now, with a price of around $3,300.
The MateBook Fold’s 18-inch display folds at a 90-degree angle to form a 13-inch upper screen, mimicking a traditional laptop with a digital keyboard instead of a physical one. The device weighs just 1.16kg (~2.6lbs), with its tandem OLED offering a 3.3K (3296 x 2472) resolution and a peak brightness of up to 1600 nits. The laptop also comes with up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage.
This also marks the debut of Huawei’s in-house operating system, called HarmonyOS 5, on PC. Huawei first launched HarmonyOS on Android, but it has since brought its operating system to PCs after losing access to Microsoft Windows in March due to US sanctions. In addition to coming with the MateBook Fold, the system is available on the new MateBook Pro as well.
Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer, but it’s also one of the best times of the year to snag a seriously good deal on a top-tier TV. Right now, for instance, you can buy LG’s C4 OLED at Amazon, Best Buy, and LG’s online storefront in the 42-inch configuration starting at an all-time low of around $796.99 ($703 off). Larger configurations are also on sale, including the 65-inch model, which is available for $1,296.99 ($1,403 off) from Amazon, Best Buy, and LG.
Although it’s no longer LG’s latest OLED, the C4 remains an excellent investment. It shares many of the same strengths as its successor, the C5, including deep blacks, rich contrast, and vibrant, lifelike colors, with only a slight drop in brightness and processing speed. Plus, thanks to support for both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, the C4 delivers an immersive, cinematic experience right from your living room.
In addition to streaming, the C4 is also a fantastic gaming TV. It boasts a fast 144Hz refresh rate, four HDMI 2.1 ports, low input lag, and support for both AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync. Rounding out the package, the last-gen TV also works with the wand-like Magic Remote and integrates with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant for easy, nearly hands-free navigation, making it a highly capable pick for all your home theater and gaming needs.
Microsoft is unveiling its own command-line text editor at its Build conference today. Edit on Windows will be accessible by using “edit” in a command prompt, allowing developers to edit files within the command line. It’s part of several improvements aimed at bettering the Windows experience for developers.
Edit on Windows is an open-source project by Microsoft, and it enables developers to edit files directly in the command line, just like vim, without having to switch to another app or window. Edit is small and lightweight, at less than 250KB in size. All the menu options on Edit have key bindings, and you can open multiple files and switch between them using the ctrl + P shortcut. Microsoft has also added find and replace to Edit, as well as match case and regular expression support, as well. Edit also supports word wrapping.
“What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows,” explains Christopher Nguyen, product manager of Windows Terminal. “32-bit versions of Windows ship with the MS-DOS Edit or, but 64-bit versions do not have a CLI editor installed inbox.”
Microsoft also wanted to avoid the “how do I exit vim?” meme, so it built its own text editor instead of relying on other available options. “Because we wanted to avoid this for a built-in default editor, we decided that we wanted a modeless editor for Windows (versus a modal editor where new users would have to remember different modes of operation and how to switch between them),” Nguyen says.
Edit on Windows will be available in the Windows Insider program in the coming months. Microsoft has more information about Edit over at its GitHub repo.
Microsoft is also rebranding its Windows Dev Home to Advanced Windows Settings. “Advanced Windows Settings allow developers to easily control and personalize their Windows experience,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri. Instead of being a separate app, it simply exposes additional toggles in the main Windows 11 settings interface, including the ability to enable File Explorer with GitHub control details.
A Microsoft employee disrupted the company’s Build developer conference in Seattle, Washington, this morning, protesting against the company’s cloud and AI contracts with the Israeli government. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had only been onstage for a matter of minutes before protesters started interrupting his speech, with one shouting, “Free Palestine!” Nadella continued his keynote, ignoring the protesters as they were escorted out of a hall inside the Seattle conference center.
Microsoft employee Joe Lopez, who has spent the past four years working as a firmware engineer on the company’s Azure hardware systems team, was one of the protesters who interrupted Nadella. He was also joined by a fired Google employee who was part last year’s sit-in protests against Google’s cloud contract with Israel.
We asked Microsoft to comment on today’s protest at Build, but the company did not respond in time for publication.
Shortly after Lopez’s interruption, he sent an email to thousands of Microsoft employees, telling them he was “shocked by the silence of our leadership,” just days after Microsoft responded to employee protests by claiming it hadn’t found any evidence that its Azure and AI tech has harmed people in Gaza.
“Leadership rejects our claims that Azure technology is being used to target or harm civilians in Gaza,” says Lopez in his email. “Those of us who have been paying attention know that this is a bold-faced lie. Every byte of data that is stored on the cloud (much of it likely containing data obtained by illegal mass surveillance) can and will be used as justification to level cities and exterminate Palestinians.”
Microsoft announced last week that it had recently conducted an internal review and used an unnamed external firm to assess how its technology is used in the conflict in Gaza. Microsoft says that its relationship with the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMOD) is “structured as a standard commercial relationship,” and that it has “found no evidence that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people or that IMOD has failed to comply with our terms of service or our AI Code of Conduct.”
This latest employee protest comes just weeks after after two former Microsoft employees disrupted the company’s 50th-anniversary event, with one calling Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, a “war profiteer” and demanding that Microsoft “stop using AI for genocide in our region.” A second protester interrupted Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former CEO Steve Ballmer, and Nadella later on in the event.
The protests have been organized by No Azure for Apartheid, a group of current and former Microsoft employees rallying against Microsoft’s contracts with the Israeli government. The group accuses Microsoft of “supporting and enabling an apartheid state” by not suspending sales of cloud and AI services to Israel. It has also highlighted media reports that detail the Israeli military’s increased use of Azure and OpenAI technology to gather information through mass surveillance and use AI tools to transcribe and translate phone calls, texts, and audio messages.
Hossam Nasr — an organizer of No Azure for Apartheid and a former Microsoft employee who was fired for holding a vigil outside Microsoft’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza — called the company’s latest statement contradictory last week. “In one breath, they claim that their technology is not being used to harm people in Gaza, while also admitting they don’t have insight into how their technologies are being used,” said Nasr. “It’s very clear that their intention with this statement is not to actually address their worker concerns, but rather to make a PR stunt to whitewash their image that has been tarnished by their relationship with the Israeli military.”
Here is Joe Lopez’s email in full:
Fellow Microsoft workers and Microsoft leadership, By now you may have seen or heard of my disruption at the Microsoft Build keynote this morning. I have been working as a firmware engineer under Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure (AHSI) for the past 4 years. As a Microsoft worker – while I’ve had positive experiences here, working and learning with many incredible people – I can no longer stand by in silence as Microsoft continues to facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
Like many of you, I have been watching the ongoing genocide in Gaza in horror. I have been shocked by the silence, inaction, and callousness of world leaders as Palestinian people are suffering, losing their lives and their homes while they plead for the rest of the world to pay attention and act.
Like many of you, I have tried to do my part in small ways. Staying informed, sharing information with friends, signing petitions, making donations. All the while continuing my work at Microsoft.
My disillusionment with Microsoft
Then I came across the No Azure for Apartheid movement, whose members have been organizing, taking action, and speaking out no matter the cost. I saw Ibtihal and Vaniya’s disruption of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary on April 4 and was shocked to hear the words coming from their mouths. Microsoft is killing kids? Is my work killing kids?
I was also shocked by the silence of our leadership. By the silence of Mustafa Suleyman, Brad Smith, Kevin Scott, Scott Guthrie, and Satya Nadella. “Why aren’t they responding”? I asked myself. “If we are truly not guilty, shouldn’t they deny these horrible accusations?”
I started to look deeper. I read the articles, saw the evidence, heard the testimonies of employees who were horrified to find out that the technology that we are building is being used by Israel in their mission to erase the Palestinian people.
A switch had been flipped. Presented with this information, I went into work everyday plagued by thoughts of the suffering that is being inflicted by a United States-Israeli war machine that runs on Azure. I joined Microsoft because I truly believed that it was the “more ethical big tech”. I thought that the work that I was doing was empowering people, not causing harm.
Microsoft’s admission of complicity
Microsoft recently uploaded a blog post, marking its first official response to the concerns that many have been shouting into their ears for years. Their statement falls far short of what we are demanding. Nontransparent audits into our cloud operations in Israel (conducted by no other than Microsoft itself and an unnamed external entity) that declare no wrongdoing by the company do not give me any sense of relief. In fact, this response has further compelled me to speak out. Microsoft openly admitted to allowing the Israel Ministry of Defense “special access to our technologies beyond the terms of our commercial agreements”. Do you really believe that this “special access” was allowed only once? What sort “special access” do they really need? And what are they doing with it?
Leadership rejects our claims that Azure technology is being used to target or harm civilians in Gaza. Those of us who have been paying attention know that this is a bold-faced lie. Every byte of data that is stored on the cloud (much of it likely containing data obtained by illegal mass surveillance) can and will be used as justification to level cities and exterminate Palestinians. We don’t need an internal audit to know that a top Azure customer is committing crimes against humanity. We see it live on the internet every day.
As one of the largest companies in the world, Microsoft has immeasurable power to do the right thing: demand an end to this senseless tragedy, or we will cease our technological support for Israel. If leadership continues to ignore this demand, I promise that it won’t go unnoticed. The world has already woken up to our complicity and is turning against us. The boycotts will increase and our image will continue to spiral into disrepair.
Call to action
My future children will one day ask me what I did for the Palestinian people as they were suffering and pleading for our help. I hope they will forgive me for my previous inaction. Many of you have children who may be asking you that question today. What will you tell them?
As Israel continues its deadly blockade of Gaza, and Netanyahu continues to assert that he will not rest until Gaza is fully occupied, we know that this situation is beyond dire. I wouldn’t have risked my career and my livelihood if I didn’t believe that to the core of my being. It’s terrifying to speak up, especially right now. Imagine your home being demolished as soldiers stand by cheering.
Your friends and family members dismembered by bombs that drop daily in your neighborhood.
Every member of your community on the brink of death due to starvation
Strangers staking claims to your home, awaiting your death.
Wouldn’t you hope that someone would speak up for you?
I recognize my privilege as a young person with little financial responsibility to anyone but myself and little risk of deportation as a US citizen. Not everyone can afford to do what I did without great risk to themselves and their family. But no act is too small when human lives are at stake. Sign the petition, join the movement, start the conversation with colleagues, please contribute whatever you can to the cause.
I know many of you out there are also considering leaving Microsoft for the same reasons I am. You are not alone. If you find it is too debilitating to work at this company and you wish to leave, please lean on our campaign to support. If we continue to remain silent, we will pay for that silence with our humanity.
Looking back, I’m ashamed of my past silence. But as the saying goes: “The best time to act was yesterday, the second best time is today.”
Bluesky is making it easier to know when an NBA game is happening with a new test that adds a red border to the NBA’s profile picture, along with a “live” callout below it. When you click the profile picture, you’ll be taken out of Bluesky and to whatever live event the organization is promoting, Bluesky COO Rose Wang announced yesterday.
“We aren’t trapping you in Bluesky,” Wang writes in her post. “We want you to use Bluesky to discover what’s happening.”
In the announcement, Wang quote-posted an NBA promotional post about two games that were set to take place last night, indicating that the badge would have shown up during them. Bluesky didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s email asking for a screenshot of the new indicator and whether it plans to extend the test to other sports or non-sports organizations. As TechCrunch points out, Wang confirmed that the feature will appear for WNBA games as well.
Though Wang doesn’t say it, her post feels like a dig at the various deals Twitter made with sports organizations like the NFL, MLB and NHL, and the NBA to stream their content on its platform, rather than linking out to their streams elsewhere. In an interview with SportsPro last month, Wang said Bluesky doesn’t have the means or desire to take on partnerships like those, but the new live badge testing shows it’s certainly not above doing what it can to nurture its burgeoning “Sports Bluesky.”
There are four different models of budget-minded Asus TUFs equipped with the RTX 5060, and configuration options beyond that.
Asus is updating three of its gaming laptop lines with configurations featuring the new GeForce RTX 5060 GPU, offering features like Multi Frame Generation for higher framerates at slightly lower prices. Nvidia’s mid-range graphics are coming to the beefy ROG Strix G16 and G18, ROG Zephyrus G14 hybrid gaming / creativity laptop, and the entry-level TUF Gaming A14, A16, A18, and F16.
That’s seven new laptops from Asus. And with the 5060 becoming the new entry-level card for each line, the new configs can be around $300 to $400 cheaper than their 5070 versions. Prices on the new 5060 models are as low as $1,499.99 to slightly higher configurations (with faster CPUs, more RAM, and more storage) as pricey as $2,099.99.
That low $1,499.99 and high $2,099.99 both lie in the ROG Strix G16. The Strix G16 and G18 look much like stripped-down versions of their pricier Strix Scar counterparts, with 16- and 18-inch 2560 x 1600 240Hz displays and the same wraparound RGB light bars built into their chassis. Though, the more simplified Strix G models have IPS panels instead of Mini LED, and no fancy lid with animated LEDs. The new RTX 5060-equipped G16 and G18 are offered with Intel (Raptor Lake Refresh / Arrow Lake) and AMD (Dragon Range / Fire Range) chip options, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of storage.
As Strix laptops are bulky machines (weighing as much as seven pounds in the 18-inch model), they’re loaded with ports, including HDMI 2.1, ethernet, 3.5mm audio jack, five total USB ports for Intel models (three USB-A, one USB-C, and one Thunderbolt 4), and four total USB ports for AMD configs (two USB-A and two USB4).
The new Asus TUF Gaming laptops also come in a variety of sizes and flavors, all now equipped with less costly RTX 5060 configurations than just their current RTX 5070 configurations. Like the Strix G models, the TUFs are fairly chunky gaming-focused laptops but they make some sacrifices for the sake of reaching certain price points, like lower 144Hz and 165Hz refresh rates and the TUF A18 having an ancient USB 2.0 plug among its five total USB ports. (Heresy, I know.)
At $1,599.99 there’s the 18-inch TUF A18 and 16-inch TUF F16. The A18 comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 260 (Hawk Point) CPU and the F16 has an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX (Arrow Lake). The TUF A14 and TUF A16 are next up at $1,699.99, with the 14-inch packing an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 (the same Krackan Point chip I recently tested on the Framework Laptop 13) and the 16-inch getting the same Ryzen 7 260 as its bigger 18-inch sibling.
The simplest update is for Asus’s ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop, which is getting a $1,799.99 configuration with RTX 5060 graphics. The Zephyrus is Asus’s thinner gaming laptop that leans a little more towards the conventional, lending itself to traveling and not looking totally out of place in a cafe or library.
The laptop still looks as it did when the G14 was redesigned back in early 2024, with a 14-inch 2880 x 1800 120Hz OLED display, AMD Ryzen AI 9 270 CPU, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, one USB4, one USB-C, two USB-A, HDMI 2.1, and a 3.5mm audio jack. Just as the recently refreshed models from CES using higher-end RTX 50-series GPUs, its USB-C ports got a tiny upgrade that allows you to use Power Delivery charging on either side. But, of course, if you want to get the most graphics power out of this compact gaming laptop you’ll have to plug in its hefty charger with reversible proprietary connector.
Since all of these laptops are equipped with the RTX 5060, they’re compatible with Nvidia’s DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation. While some models are available now through Asus’s online store and select retailers, the full availability of all configs is expected through June.
Web developers will be able to start leveraging on-device AI in Microsoft’s Edge browser soon, using new APIs that can give their web apps access to Microsoft’s Phi-4-mini model, the company announced at its Build conference today. And Microsoft says the API will be cross-platform, so it sounds like these APIs will work with the Edge browser in macOS, as well.
The 3.8-billion-parameter Phi-4-mini is Microsoft’s latest small, on-device model, rolled out in February alongside the company’s larger Phi-4. With the new APIs, web developers will be able to add prompt boxes and offer writing assistance tools for text generation, summarizing, and editing. And within the next couple of months, Microsoft says it will also release a text translation API.
Microsoft is putting these “experimental” APIs forth as potential web standards, and in addition to being cross-platform, it says they’ll also work with other AI models. Developers can start trialing them in the Edge Canary and Dev channels now, the company says.
Google offers similar APIs for its Chrome browser. With them, developers can use Chrome’s built-in models to offer things like text translation, prompt boxes for text and image generation, and calendar event creation based on webpage content.
I reported in my Notepad newsletter earlier this month that Microsoft was getting ready to host Elon Musk’s Grok AI models, and now it’s official. At Microsoft’s Build developer conference today, the company confirmed it’s expanding its Azure AI Foundry models list to include Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini from xAI.
“These models will have all the service level agreements (SLAs) Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product,” says Microsoft. The Grok AI models will be hosted and billed directly by Microsoft, and offered to its own product teams and customers through its Azure AI Foundry service.
It’s a surprise addition that could prove controversial internally and further inflame tensions with Microsoft’s partner OpenAI. Microsoft has been steadily growing its Azure AI Foundry business over the past year, and has been quick to embrace models from a variety of AI labs that compete with its OpenAI partner.
In January I reported in Notepad that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had moved with haste to get engineers to test and deploy DeepSeek R1 as it made headlines around the world. Engineers didn’t sleep much over those days while they worked overtime to get R1 ready for Azure AI Foundry.
Sources tell me Nadella has been pushing for Microsoft to host Grok, as he’s eager for Microsoft to be seen as the hosting provider for any popular or emerging AI models. Grok is the latest model to join the Azure AI Foundry, which is quickly becoming an important AI service for Microsoft as it seeks to be seen as the platform to host AI models for businesses and app developers.
The announcement of Grok on Azure AI Foundry comes just days after the chatbot spent hours telling every X user that the claim of white genocide in South Africa is highly contentious. xAI blamed the behavior on an “unauthorized modification” to Grok’s code. xAI has had a similar problem earlier this year, when the company blamed an unnamed ex-OpenAI employee for pushing a change to Grok that saw it disregard any sources that accused Elon Musk or Donald Trump of spreading misinformation.
Naturally, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was quick to poke fun at Grok in an X post last week. OpenAI countersued Musk earlier this month over claims that the Tesla boss is using “bad-faith tactics to slow down OpenAI.” Elon Musk and OpenAI have been in a legal spat for months now, after Musk’s messy breakup with the AI lab he helped to cofound nearly 10 years ago.
Microsoft is making its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) open-source today, opening up the code for community members to contribute to. After launching WSL for Windows 10 nearly nine years ago, it has been a multiyear effort at Microsoft to open-source the feature that enables a Linux environment within Windows.
“It has been a consistent request from the developer community for some time now,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge. “It took us a little bit of time, because we needed to refactor the operating system to allow WSL to live in a standalone capacity that then allowed us to open-source the project and be able to have developers go and make contributions and for us to ingest those into the Windows pipeline and ship it at scale.”
The WSL code is now available on GitHub, allowing developers to download it and build it from source, participate in fixes, or even add new features. The WSL community hasn’t had access to Microsoft’s source code in the past, but that hasn’t stopped them from making contributions that have helped improve WSL over the years. Davuluri says he’s now expecting that developers will use the open-source project to help improve WSL performance, or for more integration into Linux services.
It’s a major milestone for WSL, which started off life in 2016 as part of the Windows 10 Anniversary update. “At that time WSL was based on a pico process provider, lxcore.sys, which enabled Windows to natively run ELF executables, and implement Linux syscalls inside the Windows kernel,” explains Pierre Boulay, senior software engineer at Microsoft. “Over time it became clear that the best way to provide optimal compatibility with native Linux was to rely on the Linux kernel itself.”
Microsoft announced its second major version of WSL in 2019, eventually adding GPU support and then moving to ship the project separate to Windows. “It eventually became clear that to keep up the growing community and feature requests, WSL had to move faster, and ship separately from Windows,” says Boulay. “That’s why in 2021 we separated WSL from the Windows codebase, and moved it to its own codebase.” In the latest 24H2 update for Windows 11, Microsoft has fully transitioned WSL users to a package that’s separate from Windows, instead of the WSL component that was baked into the OS.
All of these changes to WSL in recent years have led Microsoft to close off the first ever issue raised on its WSL repo on GitHub, asking “Will this be open-source?” That answer is very much yes now, and it’s a part of making Windows more developer-friendly. “Our goal is quite simple: we want Windows to be a great dev box for developers,” says Davuluri. “That’s really the ambition.”
Microsoft launched its Copilot Plus PC and Windows AI efforts last year, and now it’s going a step further today with native Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Windows and the launch of the Windows AI Foundry. The groundwork is necessary for a future envisioned by Microsoft whereby automated AI agents assist their human companions.
Introduced by Anthropic late last year, MCP is an open-source standard that’s often referred to as the “USB-C port of AI” apps. Just as USB-C connects devices from many manufacturers to a variety of peripherals, developers can use MCP to quickly let their AI apps or agents talk to other apps, web services, or now even parts of Windows. Microsoft’s embrace of this protocol is a big part of its ambitions to reshape Windows and make it ready for a world of AI agents to be able to connect to apps and services in ways that haven’t been possible before.
“We want Windows as a platform to be able to evolve to a place where we think agents are a part of the workload on the operating system, and agents are a part of how customers interact with their apps and devices on an ongoing basis,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge.
Microsoft is supporting MCP in a big way inside Windows, alongside even broader efforts to power what it calls the agentic web. To evolve Windows to this agentic world that Microsoft envisions, the company is introducing some new developer capabilities to enable this MCP framework for AI agents to expose key Windows functionality that AI agents will be able to access.
An MCP registry on Windows will act as the secure, trustworthy source for all MCP servers that AI agents will be able to access. “Agents can discover the installed MCP servers on client devices via the MCP registry for Windows, leverage their expertise, and offer meaningful value to end users,” says Davuluri. MCP servers will be able to access things like the Windows File System, windowing, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
In a demo during a briefing for Microsoft’s MCP in Windows announcement, the company showed me an early preview of how Perplexity on Windows could leverage MCP capabilities. Instead of having to manually select folders of documents, Perplexity can simply query the MCP registry to find a Windows file system MCP server to connect to. This allows Perplexity to perform file searches on behalf of a user in a more natural way, so you could simply say “find all the files related to my vacation in my documents folder,” instead of having to add this folder or the documents manually.
You could imagine how a world of MCP servers and hosts inside Windows might eventually open the operating system up to a lot more automated app features, especially for querying data from the web inside apps like Excel. We’re also starting to see Microsoft make parts of Windows AI-powered through AI agents. Copilot Plus PCs will soon have access to an AI agent settings interface, which lets you control system settings using natural language queries.
This type of MCP functionality also opens Windows up to a world of new attack methods from malicious actors. The security risks of MCP have been well documented in recent months, with warnings of potential token theft, server compromises, and prompt injection attacks. Microsoft is well aware of the security risks of embracing MCP at such an early stage, so the company is only making a preview available to select developers to help work on its feature set and secure it fully.
“I think we have a solid set of foundations and more importantly a solid architecture that gives us all the tools to start, to do this securely,” explains David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. “We’re going to put security first, and ultimately we’re considering large language models as untrusted, as they can be trained on untrusted data and they can have cross-prompt injection.”
In the demo Microsoft showed me of MCP working in Windows, there were also early security prompts to let these AI apps access MCP capabilities. “Just like a web app asks for your location, you’re in control of what you share, and we want to make sure that’s intentional,” says Weston.
This is all early work from Microsoft right now, but the demo did remind me a little of Windows Vista’s UAC prompts that would pop up whenever you needed admin permissions to do things in Windows. Those became very annoying and a subject of mocking ads from Apple. Getting these prompts right will be key for Microsoft here, as it has to balance security and the convenience of using these AI agents and apps. I sure don’t want a repeat of UAC or even Apple’s copy-paste prompts that are highly irritating in iOS right now.
Microsoft is also committing to a variety of MCP security controls that Weston outlines in a blog post today, alongside some security requirements in order for MCP servers to appear in Microsoft’s official list, or registry. “These will prevent classes of attack like tool poisoning while also creating an open and diverse ecosystem of MCP servers,” says Weston. “More information on these requirements will be available when the developer preview is released.”
Alongside this big MCP push, Microsoft is also positioning its own AI platform inside Windows as the rebranded Windows AI Foundry. It integrates models from Foundry Local and other catalogs like, Ollama and Nvidia NIMs, and is designed to allow developers to tap into models available on Copilot Plus PCs, or to bring their own models through Windows ML.
Windows ML should make it a lot easier for developers to deploy their apps “without needing to package ML runtimes, hardware execution providers, or drivers with their app,” according to Davuluri. Microsoft is working closely with AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm on its Windows AI Foundry effort.
GitHub is launching an AI coding agent that can do things like fix bugs, add features, and improve documentation — all on a developer’s behalf. The agent is embedded directly into GitHub Copilot, and it will start working once a user assigns it a task, according to an announcement at Microsoft Build.
To complete its work, GitHub says the AI coding agent will automatically boot a virtual machine, clone the repository, and analyze the codebase. It also saves its changes as it works, while providing a rundown of its reasoning in session logs. When it’s finished, GitHub says the agent will tag you for review. Developers can then leave comments that the agent will automatically address.
“The agent also incorporates context from related issue or PR (pull request) discussions and follows any custom repository instructions, allowing it to understand both the intent behind the task and the coding standards of the project,” GitHub says. The new coding agent is available to Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Pro Plus users through GitHub’s site, its mobile app, and the GitHub Command Line Interface tool.
Microsoft also announced that it’s open-sourcing GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code, which means developers will be able to build upon the tool’s AI capabilities.
Correction, May 19th: An earlier version of the article stated the AI coding agent will be available through Copilot Plus, but the service is actually called Copilot Pro Plus.
Microsoft’s four-day Build conference kicks off on Monday, May 19th, with a livestream starting at 9AM PT / 12PM ET. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will be on stage to present all the latest Windows, Office, and AI news, followed by developer sessions that will be free for anyone to register and watch online.
Build is Microsoft’s annual developer conference, where the company holds in-depth sessions for developers and professionals alike to hear the latest features for Windows, Office, Azure, and much more. We’re expecting to hear a lot about AI this year, particularly Microsoft’s vision for AI agents.
Today, I’m talking with Kevin Scott, the chief technology officer of Microsoft and one of the company’s AI leaders. This is Kevin’s third time on Decoder, and he’s one of my favorite guests. He thinks a lot about the relationship between technology, art, and culture, and he’s unusually willing to dive into the weeds of it all, which obviously I can never resist.
Kevin joined the show today during Microsoft’s Build conference to talk about the future of search — the company just announced an open-source tool for websites to integrate AI-powered natural language search with just a little bit of effort, in a way that lets those site owners actually run whatever models they want and keep control of their data. It’s neat stuff — I saw some demos before Kevin and I chatted, and the improvement over the bad local search on most sites was obvious.
But the goal here isn’t just to improve the local search feature on a bunch of disconnected websites. It’s to rethink how search even works in a world where AI is more broadly distributed. Think about it this way: right now, building a search engine requires you to go and index all the pages on the internet — and then keep that index constantly updated, which is an enormous recurring cost.
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That cost is why there are really only two main search indexes: Google’s, obviously, and Microsoft’s Bing index, which powers most of the alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo that you might be familiar with. Those centralized search indexes are also the underpinnings of our current AI search tools, like the search built into ChatGPT and Bing, or Google’s AI Overviews.
But if all those websites suddenly have their own powerful natural language search tools, well, you might not need that big central index. All you really need is a standard that lets you ask a bunch of websites if they can answer your questions, which would dramatically bring down the cost of search overall and maybe let more competitors into the market. So Microsoft’s local search project is built on such a standard — it’s called Model Context Protocol, or MCP, and it’s what allows AI agents to interact with databases and services in a controlled way — not literally clicking around websites, which is what a lot of agentic products do right now.
MCP was initially developed by Anthropic. Now, the rest of the industry, including Google, is starting to support it. There’s a long way to go, but the first step is just enabling MCP on more sites, which is why Microsoft is making MCP-powered local search cheap and easy to implement.
It’s very cool to think about what the future of MCP-powered agentic search might look like. Maybe there will be more competition, or maybe websites will get more traffic and some of these businesses will be more sustainable. But there are some obvious complexities — starting with why anyone would want agents to use their services in this way and how anyone intends to make money doing it. I asked Kevin about this, and we spent some time thinking about how the future of the web stays sustainable for all the people actually making content out there.
I could talk about that forever, but since I had the time with Kevin I also made sure to ask about Microsoft’s unique and often confusing relationship with OpenAI, how he’s feeling about AI’s capabilities scaling up over time, and whether his thoughts on AI as a creative tool have been evolving as lawsuits and controversies play out in the creative community. Kevin is an author himself, after all — he wrote a book about AI back in 2020 with a foreword by a relative unknown at the time named JD Vance.
So I asked Kevin: how would he feel if someone stood outside a bookstore and just summarized his book for anyone who seemed interested in buying it. I think you’ll find that back and forth pretty interesting.
Okay: Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kevin Scott, you are the chief technology officer at Microsoft. Welcome back to Decoder.
And you’re always one of my favorite conversations, so I’m excited for this one. Microsoft has some news about search and the web, which is just in the strike zone for me on the show because I see that changing so enormously. I want to talk to you about what we’ve learned now that AI has entered its second era here, and I want to talk to you about where it’s going, just the usual stuff, small potatoes.
Let’s start with the news. Microsoft, just today as people are listening to this show, announced onstage at the Build conference a new approach to searching websites locally. Tell us what’s going on there.
I would actually frame it a little bit less as search. And what I’ve been spending a bunch of time thinking about is we have this hypothesis, and I think it keeps getting born out that you’re going to have agentic software enabled by all of these powerful new AI models that have been built over the past handful of years, and agents need to be able to do stuff on behalf of users. We’re less constrained, and you sort of called it AI’s second act, which is like the way we talk about it internally as we describe where we are right now as the middle innings. And so we’re not reasoning [in a] constrained [way] anymore. We’re sort of utility constrained, I think, in these agentic pieces of software that we’re trying to build…
Wait, utility constrained, there’s a lot of ways to unpack what that means. Maybe the harshest is “it doesn’t quite work yet.” Maybe the less harsh one is “there’s no product-market fit yet.” What do you think that means?
I think it kind of depends. If you look at software development there’s clearly product- market fit. This stuff has become just an indispensable way that people are building software like these software development agents that we built. And there, I think it’s just sort of the early prospector on the frontier of what agentic software can do. Unsurprising, as developers usually build things to make their lives easier before they build things to make everybody else’s life nominally easier. So we are a little bit further ahead there, and some of the things that we’re learning about how we’re going to need to make general-purpose agents more useful for things other than software development we’ve discovered in building these software engineer agents. One of those things [we’ve learned] is agents need to be able to access sources of information; they need to be able to take action on behalf of users by making changes in state and systems.
Things like booking a hotel room or put something on my calendar. And I think the way that you really want all of these things to happen is just sort of open protocols where you have real interoperability across the whole landscape of agents, where you can have everybody who has a service or a piece of content that they want to make agent accessible has a way to say, “Hey, here I am.” And then agents, no matter who’s building them, have a way to connect to that content and those services. The way that we talked about it onstage at Build is the agentic web. So what must exist in this world where we have lots and lots of agents doing things on behalf of users that are the moral equivalent of the things that had to emerge when the web was under development 20, 30 years ago.
So there’s the agentic web. We’ve been talking a lot about that on the show. I talked to your colleague Mustafa Suleyman about the agentic web and building agents. I’ve been calling it the DoorDash problem. I don’t have a better name for it. I feel bad for the people at DoorDash because I haven’t asked for their permission, but I keep calling it the DoorDash problem where: Okay, I want to get a sandwich. So I talk to Bing or ChatGPT or whoever and I say, “Go get me a sandwich. Alexa, go get a sandwich.” And then it goes out onto the web.
Right now, most of the agentic products will literally open a website and try to scan the website and then click around on the website and then order me a sandwich. And most of those companies are like, “Don’t do that.” Their posture is, “We don’t want you to do that. We’re going to block you and maybe if you’re small enough, we’ll let you do it, but we need to have business terms that make it so that you can just take our capability and put it in your product in this way.”
That problem has to be solved. I’m curious about how you would solve that problem. It sounds like you’re operating at just one step of abstraction beyond that, which is, assuming we solve the business problem, how can we make it so my agent can talk to DoorDash a much easier problem to solve, because clicking around its website has never seemed like a good solution.
Yeah, it is brittle and look, I think actually solving the business-model problem goes hand in hand with solving the technology problem. So it’s not just about figuring out a technical way to do something, it’s about getting all of the incentives in the ecosystem aligned the right way where good things are happening for everyone. So if you have a business and you want your business to be able to transact with users via their agent, that has to make good business sense in order for you to be willing for that to happen at all. You can’t just hack your way around that and expect it to be a durable thing. Even if you can temporarily figure out some kind of technical magic to get around the brittleness of the actual technology, you also have to get rid of the brittleness in the business model.
That is the piece that on the web right now seems most under threat, the underlying business dynamics of I start a website, I put in a bunch of schema that allows search engines to read my website and surface my content across different distributions. I might add an RSS feed, which is a standardized distribution that everyone uses and agrees on. There’s lots of ways to do this.
But I make a website, I open myself up to distribution on different surfaces. What I will get in return for that is not necessarily money — almost in every case, not money. What I’ll get is visitors to my website, and then I’ll monetize them however I choose to: selling a subscription, display ads, whatever it is. That’s broken, right? As more and more of the answers appear directly, particularly in AI-based search products, traffic to websites has generally dropped. We see this over and over again. What’s going to replace that in the agentic era, where we’ve created new schema for agents to come and talk to my website and receive some answers? What’s going to make that worth it?
I think one of the things that we are trying to do right now with some of the things that we’re announcing and that we’re trying to do in an open way is you will have technical mechanisms for agents to be able to access people’s websites, but the protocols themselves will allow you to decide what it is you want to make available and how. And so if you just look at MCP, it’s a super awesome protocol that Anthropic developed that we’re doing a whole bunch of work with Anthropic to support, and I know a ton of people in the ecosystem. So OpenAI is working with them and a bunch of folks have latched on to MCP as the moral equivalent of HTTP for the agentic web. MCP doesn’t have an opinion one way or the other about what a content or a service provider ought to make available via MCP or what the business model ought to be for that access.
And so I think one of the nice things about that is it gives people who have content or services a way to decide what the new business models will look like. So is it that an MCP endpoint is usable inside of your agent if the user has a subscription to your website? Is there going to be some kind of new advertising model where you give away some stuff for free and you use that to drive a bunch of agent activity onto your website and maybe there’s some advertising that goes on that helps with the distribution and then there are transactions that are being made where you can sort of price by conversion. I don’t know exactly what the business model is going to be, but I do know that the thing that you really are going to want to have is agency on the part of the content and service provider so that they get to decide what they make available and what the business model is for the things that they’re doing.
And MCP stands for “model context protocol”?
Correct.
That is a nascent standard, I would say. You show up to my website or something, my service, and I tell you what you can do. It’s very much the evolution of robots.txt. from what I gather. It’s more complicated, it’s more sophisticated, but the idea is very much the same. You show up and I tell you what you can do and you can’t do. Can Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic just horsepower this into existence, or is there some upside for everyone else to participate?
Well, I think if you’re a developer, there’s a ton of upside. This reminds me a lot of how things felt when I was a younger developer, when the internet was exploding into existence a few decades back, where what I wanted was a set of permissionless mechanisms where I could just go put something up on the web and then I could have other people access it in interesting ways.
And so, I do think that MCP and the thing that we are doing that maybe we’ll talk about in a minute on top of MCP — this interesting thing called [Natural Language Web], which is a set of open protocols and a bunch of code that let you, without having to seek permission from anyone, decide what you want to make available on this agentic web so that things that you’re doing are accessible by agents. And I think you’re right when you called it a nascent protocol. The thing that’s interesting is just how fast the ramp is right now, just how quickly everybody is snapping to this as a way to make your things agent accessible. And so what’s attractive I think if you are a content or service provider is that more and more of the user activity gets anchored in agents.
That’s going to be more and more of where user transactions and user attention gets funneled. And so you’re just going to want to be agent visible in what you’re doing so that you have access to an audience. And I think you really start to get into this mode where agents are doing things asynchronously for you. A lot of what happens right now in the current web model is everything happens synchronously. So you’re sort of sitting there like, “I’m staring at a browser right now. I may have a tool that I want to go buy on somebody’s Shopify storefront. My attention is focused on this particular task. I complete the transaction and then I move on to the next thing.” The interesting thing with agents is things are going to start happening asynchronously where you’re going to give an agent a task and it’s going to go do all of this stuff while your attention is elsewhere.
So that’s a super interesting thing where I think there’s going to be a bunch of opportunities that don’t exist right now because in the limit, I only have so much of my attention that I can spend on websites. If I had a bunch of agents off doing a bunch of research for me and helping me think about my summer vacation — or I’ve got this crazy project I’m doing in my shop, building a kiln for all this random pottery stuff I’m doing — if it can help me get a little bit further along so that when I’ve got my attention left to give, I can go take action immediately or maybe buy stuff or the attention [I do give] is just much higher quality. I think that’s interesting as hell for folks who are trying to do business on the web.
Let’s talk about the NL search project that you’re doing and how it connects to this larger vision. So I saw a brief demo of it. It was very cool, right? It’s a low-cost, very easy way to integrate natural anguage search into a website. One of the demos I saw was Tripadvisor. I was told that the Tripadvisor team looked at it on a Wednesday and was demoing it the next Tuesday to their company leadership. That’s cool, low-cost, it runs with all the models. You can run it with DeepSeek, you can run it with OpenAI’s 4o mini. That’s what gives you the MCP capability, right?
So you’ve run this tool with your website, you’ve exposed a benefit to your users. Here’s some natural-language search as expressed in a chatbot or custom interface if you want to build one. But then now you’ve added this MCP schema to your website that lets a Microsoft Copilot agent show up and interact with your website in some structured way that you can control. All of that is very cool. And I understand how the incentives line up. Isn’t that just a bunch of APIs by a different name? There’s just a part of me that makes that very reductive and very small.
Yeah, I think that’s actually not a bad thing. It’s actually a super good thing that it’s really a simple set of protocols that are enabling a bunch of super rich behavior that, again, going back to the fundamental premise, you want agents to be very, very useful and live up to their name. So an agent ought to be a piece of software to which you can delegate increasingly complicated tasks over time. In order for those tasks to become increasingly complicated, the agents have to be able to do work. And the best way for them to be able to do work is to have ubiquity of content and services available; you need everyone’s incentives, both hurdles to adoption and the business model, and just for the economics of everything to make sense, where you get fairly broad adoption. So simplicity is a definite feature.
Let me ask you about the elephant in the room when it comes to the web and building new capabilities on the web. It’s obviously Google. Right now the web is organized around Google’s priorities, its needs, its traffic whims. There’s an entire class of SEO consultants who wave sparklers at the sky to collect traffic for you. It’s great, we love it.
That’s obviously changing, right? As Google keeps more of the traffic for itself or it thinks differently about training data, all this stuff is changing. The trade here is make your website more agentic, and then MCP as a protocol will allow you to build some new business models on it. The problem, as I see it, is that the traffic to the web is in precipitous decline as Google referrals go into decline. How do you fix that problem so that everyone is incentivized to keep building on the web?
I don’t know, honestly. One of the ways that I could answer is, I have, just so that I can see for myself, I’ve set up a Shopify storefront. So I have a tiny little business that I operate on the side just so I can feel what it’s like to be a web-based business owner.
How does that feel?
It’s very interesting. The dance that you have to do to get traffic driven to your business and the amount of energy you have to spend tending that traffic stream. Funny enough, most of my referrals that are coming into my storefront are not from Google. Most of [them come] in through social media and social media advertising, which is really different from what I was expecting. So I don’t know that I’ve gotten any interesting referrals and certainly no conversions coming in through organic search.
What about Bing?
Like no organic search.
It’s good to know that you don’t have a thumb on the scale. That’s really what I was asking.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Laughs] I certainly don’t. In fact, I think most people at Microsoft are hearing for the first time that Kevin Scott has a Shopify storefront. So yeah, definitely do not have any kind of thumb on the scale.
I think the thing that I would love as a website operator is, I would love to have a way not to spend so much of my time worried about traffic referrals, period. I would love to spend more of my time building up an authentic relationship with people who might be interested in my products and services and have a way to curate that relationship. I would love for there to be a thing like in a web where people could buy my products and learn more about the services that I have to offer, and then have a way where they become loyal customers that I actually have a relationship with, the same way that I would have if I had a physical storefront and I had foot traffic coming into my store. And so I see all of this stuff, for me at least, as a way to have a little bit more of that dynamic than what you have when you’re playing some very abstract game trying to do SEO.
Social media at least feels to me a little bit more like what I just described, where I’ve done a very deliberate job trying to curate a social media audience to just have followers who might be interested in the things that I am doing as a maker, for instance. So, I don’t … that doesn’t answer your question at all, I know. And I know that a bunch of people have very different business objectives being on the web than just wanting to be a little small storefront.
You know what’s interesting about that? I’ve askeda lot of people over the past several years, “Why would anybody start a website?” And the frame for me is when we started The Verge, the only thing we were ever going to start was a website. We were a bunch of people who wanted to talk about technology, so in 2011 we were going to start a website. We weren’t even going to start a YouTube channel. That came later after people started doing YouTube channels at scale. At the time that we started, it was “you’re going to start a big website.”
Now in 2025, I think, Okay, if I had 11 friends who wanted to start a technology product with me, we would start a TikTok. There’s no chance we would be like, we have to set up a giant website and have all these dependencies. We would start a YouTube channel, and I’ve asked people, “Why would anyone start a website now?” And the answer almost universally is to do e-commerce. It’s to do transactions outside of platform rules or platform taxes. It’s to send people somewhere else to validate that you are a commercial entity of some kind, and then do a transaction, and that is the point of the web.
The other point of the web, as far as I can tell, is that it has become the dominant application platform on desktop. And whether that’s expressed through Electron or whether it’s expressed through the actual web itself in a browser, it’s the application layer. And so I get why you’d want to say, “Okay, we’re going to do agents. They’re going to traverse the open application layer that exists and use those tools.” I still am lost at like, well, if I just want to communicate to people, I’m going to go to some closed platform, and then we just kind of enter a place where even the AI tools just have less information to work with, because everybody talking about what to buy might be on TikTok, and then all the stuff to buy is on the web. And that’s the loop that I can’t quite close.
I think this is one of the things that could potentially happen with things like MCP and NLWeb. If the way that people want to do research or they want to transact business is via their agents, and that’s where the intent lives and where the user desire originates, then you’re going to want to have some mechanism where you can connect to that.
So let’s say you and your 11 friends in 2025 are going to start a TikTok channel to talk about tech. If one of the things that you’re doing there is doing a bunch of reviews about tech products or tech sites and you want to reach an audience and the audience is sitting inside of Copilot or ChatGPT or something like that, you’re going to want those agentic pieces of software to have some way where they can reach into your media channel so that you’re exposing that audience to what you’re putting out there.
And NLWeb might be a good way to do that, where maybe you’re not offering up everything, but you’re offering … kind of like what’s happened with search, like teasers, like snippets, things where it is like, Okay, you ask your agent, “Hey, I’m trying to buy a new phone. Here’s kind of what I think I want. Can you go find me some sources of information about this?’” And if you have from your TikTok channel a way to let your agent know what your content is, maybe that’s the referral traffic back into TikTok from the agents like, “Hey, go watch this video. This is super interesting.”
I’m really curious to see if the big platforms enable themselves to be searched or acted on by agents in the way that they somewhat had to allow themselves to be searched by the big search engines, right?
There wasn’t a choice. I think maybe the biggest platform that recused itself from search for a minute was Facebook, but Instagram is still searchable. Right? There was a trade where you wanted to be exposed and to be found on these tools, so everyone sort of opened up. And the dynamics of how you will open up to agents, I think, for a variety of reasons, many of which make sense, are just not clear. Why would we do this when we could build our own agent? We’re still in those early stages.
I don’t know the answer to that question.
To put it in search terms, are you going to do vertical search or big horizontal search? Horizontal search sort of totally won.
It’s hard to say what exactly might happen here. I think it will largely be decided by users. One of the things that’s going to happen is users will just decide what it is they’re going to tolerate. So if using an agent to help you sort out your life and what you’re doing becomes such a huge preference that people have, things that aren’t connected to the agent will kind of turn invisible for folks. You’ll just sort of think, “Oh, well, X isn’t reachable by my agent, maybe X is kind of broken and I’ll find another way to do that.” And I think the thing that you want as the market kind of figures out what it wants is you want as many open protocols as humanly possible so that people can make those late-binding decisions about whether this is what the users have chosen. They’re expressing their preferences. At least have this thing be open so that I can opt in to it when the preference is clear.
I’m dying to know how this plays out. I can see a bunch of sites like Tripadvisor and others that would really want this kind of distribution. Obviously, we need to build the front-end tools, the aggregators that say, “Okay, here’s your agent that’s going to go out.” Do you think having looked at the agents that have been demoed so far or announced and then not shipped or announced and shipped to five people, do you think that this is a necessity? Do you think that initiating MCP across the web like this is a necessary condition for agentic systems to operate? Because none of them work so far.
I think something like this is really kind of necessary. I mean, I remember back when I was working in the early days of mobile on advertising, and the reason that I worked on mobile advertising is I wanted to figure out a way to help people who were building mobile apps and services to figure out distribution and to figure out how they monetize themselves. Before things like AdMob came into existence, the only way that you could get distribution was you went and cut a BD deal with a mobile phone company, and it would decide whether or not it was going to give you placement — at the time it was WML [wireless markup language], and it was placement on itsir deck. And it was kind of a barbaric arrangement. It made perfect sense back then, but if you look at what happened with the technology and fast-forward through time, it’s like, yeah, why would anyone choose that?
And so I think there’s a little bit of that dynamic right now, where people are absolutely finding utility in these agents, even as constrained as they are right now. And so in places like software development, where you need to have a much narrower range of things that the agents can actuate, where you’ve built some completeness there, like, Oh my god, the adoption is great and people love what these things are doing, and there’s a ton of competition, and it’s just really transforming how software development is working.
So what I think we’re going to see — and this is me, Kevin Scott, the optimist — is if you had a real complete agentic web where MCP was sort of the lingua franca of this agentic web, kind of like HTTP was, like everybody can just of stand up an HTTP server and start serving HTML and they get to decide what the HTML payload is. You’re going to see this really interesting organic unfolding of what’s possible, and it’ll probably just sort of, I don’t know what the moral equivalent of the Amazon.com or the early winners in the web are, where when you get enough of that plumbing hooked up that things are going to be super useful. But I think that some of this protocol stuff has to happen before you get to full utility. It’s why MCP is interesting. We think about NLWeb as kind of like the HTML layer, so it is a thing that lets you not have to go do a really tremendous amount of low-level work in order to be able to plumb your stuff up to the agentic web.
The parallel that comes to mind here is Apple’s attempt to build an agentic Siri, which is built on a framework in Apple’s operating system called App Intents, which allows iOS apps to expose themselves to Siri in some way and lets Siri take actions inside those apps. There are rough parallels here — obviously MCP is a more open standard; it’s more nascent. App Intents has run into the same business-model problems: if you’re an app developer in iOS, why would you let Siri use the app and not the user, so you can upsell them or sell them an in-app subscription? That’s one parallel.
The other parallel is Alexa Plus, which I joked earlier has launched to some people, but no one knows who they are. Google has some agentic ideas. There’s computer use from Anthropic, OpenAI. None of it’s worked yet. Have you seen anything that says this is definitely going to work?
I get the… No. So yeah, to answer your question very specifically, outside of software engineering and outside of demos, I haven’t concretely seen the thing that works, and I’ll just sort of ground it even more. So if I look at my everyday life, and I’m sort of looking at how I use these things, outside of software development, there’s just not an awful lot that I’m choosing, that Kevin Scott is choosing, to go delegate a bunch of stuff to this agent to do on my behalf. But I can kind of smell it with MCP, and I do think it actually has to be open. I think it’s kind of hard to do this in a vertically integrated way.
The other question I want to ask, I’m really putting the media training to use here. I’m going to ask you about Google. Google had an opportunity to achieve some of the success it did because Microsoft was in the throes of antitrust pressure, right? Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer, putting pressure on Netscape — that led to whatever amount of legal trouble. Google was able to swoop in, it was able to put Chrome on Windows, and it created the application layer. Everybody has this story. The antitrust pressure on Microsoft really created the opportunities for Google to succeed.
Here we are. It’s many years later, decades later. There’s a lot of antitrust pressure on Google, particularly in regard to how it controls the web, both in the advertising layer and in the search layer. There’s the suggestion that the government will make Google divest Chrome. This is a lot of antitrust distraction, and here I am talking to a Microsoft executive about new ideas for the web and new standards for the web. Do you see the opportunity as the same, that there’s space because Google is being distracted?
I think the opportunity is the moment that we’re in — the technology itself is just ready for some of this stuff to happen. This demo that Guha gave you couldn’t have been done two or three years ago because the technology wasn’t ready. It would’ve been just impossibly difficult to do, and there was no way that Tripadvisor could see a thing on a Tuesday and be demoing it on its own data on a Wednesday. That is entirely a function of technology maturity. So I don’t know what’s going to happen with anything that the government is doing with any of the other tech companies.
But I think part of what’s happening right now is you just have a new set of technologies that are capable of a new set of things, and you’ve got a bunch of big-tech companies and small entrepreneurs who see the possibility in the thing. And the thing that I want is to see as much energy in this ecosystem becoming more mature, as much as is humanly possible. And again, my pattern matching goes back to the last time that I was a happy young developer, which was when the internet was emerging — just that sensation that you can have when a bunch of hard things became easy and a bunch of the protocols opened, and you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to go try something wild. That’s when interesting things happen.
Let me just put a little bit of pressure on this then. I want to broaden out and just talk about AI generally. If you had showed up and said, “Okay, here’s a new standard for accessing the web and structuring websites from Microsoft” two years ago, everyone would’ve said, “Great, we’re going to wait for Google’s riff on this,” or “for Google to adopt the standard.” Google’s under a lot of pressure. A lot of trust has been erased from Google. You now have the opportunity for OpenAI and Anthropic and Microsoft to show up with a new standard and to believe that there might be real adoption here, and that Google can’t show up with its own standard tomorrow and take the wind out of your sails. That has to be true for you, right? You feel that.
Because the comparison I would make is, I don’t know, in the late ’90s or early 2000s someone would announce a new standard, and Microsoft would show up with a proprietary Windows riff on that standard and the other thing would go away, and that was part of the problem. Do you see that reflection right now?
I don’t know. Sometimes I am trying to be evasive. I’m not trying to be evasive here. Sometimes it feels to me, as an engineer, that certain things are technically inevitable. I’ve had a bunch of conversations with folks about MCP inside Microsoft where it’s like, Ah, this isn’t exactly what we would’ve chosen. And I’m like, yeah, but it kind of doesn’t matter. Sometimes there is a real problem in an ecosystem where the simplest solution that everybody can choose to adopt is the winner because we all win because ubiquity is the thing that really matters, and it feels like we’ve got a bunch of those opportunities right now.
And so the thing that I think that’s really beneficial is some of them have become such simple things where you actually don’t need a multitrillion dollar company to go do an enormous amount of work to create the conditions for adoption to happen quickly. In some sense, with MCP and NLWeb, you actually don’t need a big-tech company pushing for it. We’re just a voice out here saying, “Hey, here’s this interesting thing. It’s open. Go do with it what you will,” and that’s all I can do. I don’t have the ability in terms of open protocols to tell anybody to do anything. We will shine a light on it and hope good things will happen.
Let’s talk about the AI industry broadly. You described it as middle innings. I’m describing it as act two. This technology exists. Everyone has used it. We’ve all played with a chatbot. Some reporters have had the chatbot ask them to leave their wives. I will never stop making this joke. Just broadly, what did you get right in your initial bets and what did you get wrong? What surprised you?
I think we accurately spotted the scaling-law trends with the reasoning power of foundation models. I think we’ve been more right than wrong in our conviction that those trends will continue to play out. I think we still have a tremendous amount of progress to make in increasing the reasoning power of models, and I don’t want to make light of how difficult it will actually be to continue the scaling. But they seem like a set of reasonably solvable problems if you’ve got the right resources and focus.
I think the thing that’s hard right now is I feel as if we’ve got this capability overhang with models where the models are actually capable of a lot more than what they’re being used for. And so, even inside of Microsoft, I maybe overestimated how quickly people were going to just lean all the way into the platform capabilities of the basic AI models. So I think we’re a little bit behind right now on product. And by we, I don’t mean Microsoft. I mean everybody, aside from this rapid progress we’re seeing in software development tools. So I think there are things in healthcare that could be a lot better than they are right now. A bunch of things are inhibited by some basic plumbing stuff, which is the topic of this particular conversation. But a lot of it is we just need a lot more companies to get created and a lot more products to get made just to use what’s already possible with these models.
And a little bit of it too is, I have this conversation over and over and over again. I was at a gathering with developers late last week and there’s this interesting conservatism that is especially unhelpful with exponentially improving platforms. And it wouldn’t even look like conservatism if you didn’t have the exponentially improving platform. It’s like somebody will look at a thing and say, “Ah, this is a little bit too expensive for me to use for this particular thing” or”for a particular problem I’m trying to solve,” or it’s marginally useful right now so it gets things right about 30 percent of the time, but that’s only marginally useful. And then it’s, “Okay, I’m just going to pause and wait.”
And that may be the right thing to do, except for the wait part of the pause, as the wait is too long in many cases right now. The next time people go in and sample to see if it’s gotten cheaper or more capable, it’s already raced past where it needed to be and then you’re just too late in trying to get your thing to market. And so I think that’s a thing that I’m seeing over and over again where we collectively are making mistakes, where our pattern matching isn’t as good as it could be.
Right. You’re saying that you should envision the products, even if they’re not a hundred percent great yet.
Yeah.
It’s interesting you mentioned that because you were one of the architects of the OpenAI relationship at Microsoft. A couple of years ago you were on the show. I asked you about that relationship and where it came from, and you described that relationship in terms of platforms. That Microsoft was a platform company, obviously Azure is a massive platform. And you said, “OpenAI is aligned with you on the platform vision, and we wanted to structure a partnership together so we could go build the platform together.”
Things have changed in two years, I would say. The companies have pulled apart a little bit, maybe a lot. I watched the Senate hearing on AI the other day and I noticed Brad Smith from Microsoft and Sam Altman from OpenAI were at opposite ends of the table. OpenAI has become much more of a consumer company, right? It’s obviously trying to go make big consumer products, not platform products. Anthropic is much more of a platform company, I would say, than OpenAI is today. How do you see that relationship now? Has it fully decoupled? Are you still working together? Are you still trying to build a platform?
I still spend a huge amount of my time on OpenAI things, and there’s a huge amount of technical stuff. Just me as an engineer, we’re building big computing systems together. OpenAI is a gigantic Azure customer. Its workload is really a nontrivial part of our platform, particularly in terms of AI compute. So we are working with OpenAI all the time trying to make sure that we are building things that it needs, and there’s still just a ton of work that we’re doing together across the board, everything from how do we optimize the infrastructure that we’re building to how do we take these models that we’re training and get them optimized so that they can actually become platform components. We still operate a joint deployment safety board where we work to assure that the things that we’re releasing to the public have gone through a rigorous, responsible AI review before they launch. So yeah, just a ton of work that we’re doing together.
If you listen carefully, there’s a qualitative difference from what you said before, right? “OpenAI is our huge Azure customer with a big workload.” Of course, everybody works closely with their biggest customers. Previously it was “we are interdependent and it is their models that are powering every Copilot across the company.” It very much sounds as if Microsoft has moved OpenAI from the category of independent technology partner to a big customer we work with closely.
It is very different from any other big customer that we have. The models that it is training on Azure supercomputers are still very, very important to the things that Microsoft is building. The components that it’s building are important parts of the Azure platform. So it is both a customer and platform-building partner. And look, it has a bunch of things that it’s off trying to do on its own that are independent from us, like ChatGPT for instance. And that’s awesome, because its success with ChatGPT is helping put a bunch of super good pressure on the Azure platform.
And that is another consistent thing. I don’t know whether I talked about this the last time we talked about the OpenAI partnership. But one of my core theses when we were doing the first deal, when was it, five, six years ago now, was that we needed the best AI workloads in the world to be running on Azure so we couldn ensure that Azure was building itself in a world-class way for those AI workloads of the future. And so the more successful ChatGPT is, the better Azure gets.
Speaking of those AI workloads, my colleague Tom Warren has reported that Elon Musk and xAI are preparing to host Grok on Azure. He tells me to ask you if there’s some angst within Microsoft about working with Elon, and whether you can trust that company, especially with these other dependencies. Do you feel that angst?
I’m actually not super plugged into that conversation. I know we’re doing it. The thing that we’re trying to do with the model marketplace on Azure is to make sure that all of the good open-source models that developers want to use are available and easy for them to use. So everything that we can offer there, we do offer.
Do you still control the GPU budget at Microsoft?
No, I don’t.
This is a thing you said to me several years ago, and I’ve never stopped thinking about it. You don’t anymore?
I do not. Thank god.
What happened there? Was it just like this is too much? Because you described it as a horrible job, too.
Oh, it was a horrible job. Yeah, really, really.
Has the pressure on needing GPUs lessened or increased?
No. We still need lots and lots of GPUs.
Because there is also reporting from Reuters and others that Microsoft has slowed down some of its data-center investment or reallocated it as the models have gotten cheaper to run, as things like DeepSeek have shown up.
No. We still are urgently deploying capacity. And the thing that I will say is if you are sitting inside of Microsoft and you are talking to all of your teams that are building AI products or doing AI research, I have seen no lessening because of any technology trend in the desire for more GPUs.
Do you think we can do AGI in the current hardware? This is a thing that is floating around that I keep hearing from people in this industry.
I don’t even know what AGI is, which is a thing I’ve been a little bit confused by since I wrote my book many years ago. I think first you’d have to define what exactly it is you think that means. I think if you look at the current generation of hardware that’s rolling out, we’re getting a big performance win from this next generation that’s deploying right now. And so if you are thinking about what’s going to happen over the next 12 months, it’s going to be a pretty substantial leap forward in performance just across the board of everyone’s systems because this current hardware generation and optimizations you can do on top of it are extraordinary.
Do you think that we’re going to get more capacity because of the optimizations or because the hardware is more powerful?
Well, it is absolutely true that most of the performance wins are coming from optimization, so you get on the order of 2X improvement in price performance for every hardware generation, which is extraordinary by the way. You never got that every 18 months with Moore’s Law. It was a little bit slower than that, and so the hardware advancements here are just breathtaking in terms of how good they are, but the software performance optimizations on top of the hardware are much bigger than that even, so we are just very reliably getting order of magnitude every year or so when you combine those two things.
How would you characterize those optimizations? Because a lot of the early wins in model capability came from just ingesting more data, right? We just made the models bigger and that is how they got smarter.
It’s a bunch of things.There are things that you do depending on how you’re training the models. There’s a whole bunch of things. A lot of the wins have come from being able to effectively use smaller data types to store model activations both on the inference and the training side, which means that you can do a lot more arithmetic in parallel because you have smaller numbers that you are using in your arithmetic operations. I mean, it really is kind of crazy to see the breadth of the optimizations from what you’re doing on the training side to just people fundamentally rewriting the numeric kernels for the inference stack.
And then there’s a bunch of things that you can do using your standard bag of computer science techniques around prompt optimization and caching and using more than one model to service prompts. You don’t always need to send every prompt to the most expensive model. We now have a big enough portfolio of models where you can choose to handle certain things with models that are hyper-performance optimized but less general and send the more complicated things to the bigger, more expensive models. So that’s just almost the same thing as cash optimization.
It’s funny. When I talk to the other agentic AI CEOs, they describe that kind of orchestration as the key, and you’re talking about MCP as the key, and I’m curious which one has to come first. We got pretty far in orchestration.
I think again, going back to this capability overhang, I think we have more reasoning power in these models right now than we’re effectively using, and so my hypothesis is that one of the things that is preventing us from having more useful things is just action taking and the entirety of the action space is too constrained right now, and so I’m not saying it’s an either or. I just think, and it’s going to be super hard work to get that action space opened up, and so we just need to get on it like it’s an ecosystem right now.
I want to end by talking to you about my favorite thing to talk to you about, which is the relationship between technology and art. You did write a book. It’s called Reprogramming the American Dream. The first time we ever talked, it was about that book. Somewhat notably, the foreword was written by JD Vance, who’s now the vice president of the United States. I don’t think you saw that one coming at that time.
No I did not.
You did see a lot of stuff coming about how AI would reshape the economy or at least threaten to reshape the economy.As we talk about the models getting more capable and the ways they’re getting more capable, the very notion that we could make the models more capable by just ingesting more data has hit a limit, right?
We’ve ingested all the data, and now there’s a lot of lawsuits about whether that ingestion of data was legal, whether it should be compensated. You’re an author. I’m going to put these questions to you as simply as I can. If I stood outside a bookstore and stopped everybody who came looking for your book and said, “I can just make you a podcast about that book. You just send me a note, just text me, and I’ll send you a full podcast summarizing that book,” do you think that would increase or decrease sales of your book?
Well, I will say something that’s about Kevin that I don’t know whether you can or should generalize to authors in general. I’d be fine with people doing whatever they want to with the content of my book.
Even if you had to make your living based on sales of the book?
Yeah, which is why it’s super, super different. I think authors, if you spend all of your time and dump your heart and soul into making a thing, you deserve to be compensated for it. Now, I think there’s a lot of different ways to be compensated for a thing, and I think I’m not even following what’s going on with a bunch of this litigation closely enough that even if I could comment on it, it would be useful commentary.
But I think going back to the conversation that we started with, I think one of the really nice things potentially about having open protocols for this agentic web is that people who are making things get more, particularly here at the beginning where the whole landscape hasn’t really sorted out what the business model is, I think people can sort of jump in and have more agency around the business model. And I think it’s just super important for people to think really carefully about that right now.
You didn’t? Okay. I’m curious. A lot of people did. I’m not saying I didn’t. No comment from me on that. My point is, as somebody who makes creative work here, a maker yourself, there are lots of people whose livelihood depends on economic exchange for their creative work, and their broad criticism of the AI industry is you’ve created all of this capability, maybe more capability than we’re even using as you’re saying, but we have received nothing in return. And we’re in it now, right? Act two, middle innings, and it doesn’t feel as if that has changed but for some litigation. I’m just wondering if your thinking has evolved or matured.
I think the way that I was thinking about this in the beginning is the way that I’m thinking about it right now. So I certainly wouldn’t want to see anything cause Hayao Miyazaki to make less beautiful things. I’m maybe one of the biggest fans in the world of what he and Studio Ghibli have done over the years. I think it’s just some of the most beautiful art that was created in the 20th and early 21st century, and so yeah, people like that. I want them to have every incentive in the world to do more of what they’re doing.
The thing though too with the platform is I will just f come out and say it. I’m not really super interested in these image-generator things. What I’m interested in is a model that can do medical diagnostics for my mom who lives in rural central Virginia and doesn’t have access to really super high-quality healthcare, and there are just tens of millions of people like her in the United States who are in the same predicament.
It doesn’t get better over time, because of the demographics of the United States. Studio Ghibli content has nothing to do with whether or not AI is good at medical diagnosis or not, and so that’s the thing I want to make sure of in this debate, that we can have the part of the debate, which is there’s this creative economy that I don’t want disrupted at all because I’m a fan of, and I appreciate those folks. I was having this conversation with Reid Hoffman and JJ Abrams a few months ago where, if anything, I would love for it to be the case that AI made it easier for people like JJ Abrams to do more of what they do. What I think is you just sort of have more stuff floating out there; that’s what people will want.
They’ll want more of the, “Hey, I’m a fan of JJ Abrams and his voice and his work. Give me more of that, not this random crap like what some teenager has gotten out of an image- generation model.” But that’s a very important debate to have. I don’t want that to overshadow this other thing, which is that these tools can be enormously useful for solving some very important problems. And we don’t want to have this conversation that we’re having over here, which is important to have, to impede our ability to push forward with this other stuff, which is also super important.
It’s interesting, because you are describing what more or less is the framework that the Copyright Office released before Trump fired the librarian of Congress and the register of copyrights, which appears to have backfired. And now there’s an even more copyright maximalist person in that position, because that report said some of these uses for training data are obviously fair use like scholarship and research.
I’ll just read you the quote from the Copyright Office’s preliminary report that came out last week: “Making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through legal access, taking the stuff without permission, goes beyond established various boundaries.”
So there’s a distinction. There’s some domains, like medical imaging, where the utility of this is so high and the work is so transformative that it may be fine. And then there’s some of the stuff where you’ve just copied every YouTube video in the world and you’re just letting people make more YouTube videos, and that is probably not. Can you envision a framework where that would apply to the tools Microsoft is building, where you would say this is stuff we’re going to do and this is stuff we’re not going to do?
I think we’re open to having any kind of sensible conversation. I think you just have to show up and there’s some technical limitations and constraints on what’s possible and what’s not possible with the fundamental technology, but I think there’s a super rich dialogue to be had here. There’s also this interesting thing where I think increasingly, you accurately identified that we’ve kind of exhausted all of the data that is available to train models, and so we’re now in a regime where a bunch of these systems are being trained with a set of techniques where they don’t depend as much on data as they once did, and so there may be all sorts of technical ways to enhance the reasoning capabilities of models that aren’t quite as dependent as they might’ve been at some point on ingesting a bunch of organic tokens of data.
It’s also true, I think we talked about this last time, that there’s an increasingly good understanding of the quality of data, how much a token of data contributes to the reasoning power of the model, and then the biggest thing, my bugaboo in general with all of this stuff is thinking of models as databases, as information retrieval systems, is kind of, you want to talk about a suboptimized system. They’re kind of terrible as databases just from an efficiency perspective, and so again, you go back to things like NLWeb, like here’s a model and it has learned how to reason the same way that you might’ve taught a biological brain how to reason.
And then once you have a certain level of reasoning capability, the interesting thing is prompt by prompt, task by task, what information do you have access to reason over? And how you monetize those two things and what the share of the business is between those two things can be very, very different. With one, for instance, you could have, if you need a model that’s reasoning over breaking news, if you have something like NLWeb and a subscription to a bunch of news outlets, you can provide the agent access to those subscriptions if the publisher wants to allow that using the user’s authorization tokens, and then let the model reason over that information. And you’re sort of paying a subscription fee to have this ephemeral content to reason over. So I think there are all sorts of ways we may be able to sort out the business model stuff over time.
I want to bring this all together. It sounds like with the new search project, NLWeb, and with the investment in MCP and wanting it to be more widespread, it just feels as if you’re trying to create a wholesale architecture shift for the web. This is the new kind of web, and you’re trying to incept and incentivize its creation because the deal of the old web appears to be up. Is that a fair characterization?
I don’t know whether the deal of the old web is up, but it’s kind of time for us to be thinking about some new deal, I think. And I think as we’re all collectively thinking about the new, we should do what every good architect does when they’re thinking about the new. It’s like, what has worked and what hasn’t worked for all of the constituents and stakeholders over recent years, and let’s try to go make something better that works for everyone. And we’ll get to the best outcome when everybody’s incentives are aligned, where the creators and the consumers have their interests balanced and there aren’t a bunch of weird intermediaries constraining how utility and value gets exchanged.
Well, I wish you luck because so far the creators have a very clear point of view on where their incentives are. Kevin, I could talk to you forever, obviously. You’ve got to come back soon. I want to keep an eye on this web project and see how it’s going over time.
Thank you so much for having me.
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