Microsoft is doing things differently with AI. It feels to me they are moving into local inference heavily and see a future where Windows has native AI APIs that run locally or optionally in the cloud/edge.

I hope they can finally make my "Copilot+ PC" infer things locally that are actually useful. Phi Silica for Advanced Paste was a good start, if a bit late. If they got their act together, Microsoft-Decision-1 could have some local potential. Their track record leaves me with some reservations.

Those local APIs already exist. It is called Microsoft Foundry Local: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry-local/get-st...

Supports GPU, NPU and CPU.

That’s where Apple is moving to as well. The models doing the implementation work need not be better than opus 4.6. And locally available hardware to run this already exists and likely will be sub 2k of 2026 dollars in a few years time.

Yeah, because they are desperate to try and justify the investments into Copilot and the NPUs they pushed OEMs into integrating. I'm all for competition, but every one of MS's AI models have just been nothingburgers or relabels of other lab's models. Even their novel high cardinality models are just novelties.

Honestly, I'm glad that people later to the AI game are exploring niches other than state-of-the-art "smartest" models – I'd love AI applications that tackle the small hassles in life.