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Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, flagship podcast of the Windows subsystem for Linux. I'm your friend David Pierce, and on today's show, we're going to talk about Microsoft Build. Build is Microsoft's big annual developer conference where it launches a bunch of new stuff, but also tries to just explain itself to the world and what it cares most about and what it hopes that all of its customers care about for the year to come. Big surprise, the answer this year was AI in every single imaginable way. We're going to get into all of that in just a minute, but first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Thursday, June 4th, 2026.
Instagram's new Instagram Plus subscription is rolling out. And the idea is essentially for $4 a month, you can get custom app icons, you can get a custom font in your bio, lots of little aesthetic things like that. But the big stuff is you can now keep your story up for 48 hours instead of 24. You can give your story more priority in other people's feeds so that people see it. And you get to watch other people's stories without them knowing. I think a lot of people are gonna pay $4 a month for just that one feature alone. But the big idea here is Meta increasingly wants you to pay to get your content seen, even by the people who have said that they wanna see it. Feels kind of bleak, if I'm honest with you. TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer.
said it's struggling to keep up with AI demand. Its CEO, CC Wei, said at a shareholder meeting that customer demand is so high and we can only support so much. He said, we are doing our best to ensure TSMC does not become a bottleneck. In a time where RAM is getting more expensive than ever, chips are harder than ever to find, and it is more expensive than it has ever been to buy gadgets, this feels like bad news. Especially because the CEO, CC Wei, also said he'd like to raise prices and that it's going to be a long time to be fully up to speed on production in the US. Not a great sign for the price of electronics. In better news, Cash App.
made a magic wand for paying for stuff. It's called the Cash App Wand, and it's an NFC-enabled star-topped wand that you can use to make on-the-go payments just by tapping. There's a big DIY trend here of people making things that are more fun to tap and pay with than a credit card or like your watch or your phone. I think it's incredibly charming. I love the Cash App is doing this. It's $25, and apparently there are more of these app tags to come. I'm excited about it. You can read more about all of this at TheVerge.com. That is 90 Seconds on The Verge for June 4th.
All right, let's get into Build and Microsoft's big plans for Windows, AI, and the future of pretty much absolutely everything. Joining me, Tom Warren, who was at Build all week from San Francisco. You're at Build. You've been doing the Build thing all week. Tell me about the vibes. I remember last year's Build. Weird vibes. Everybody's very angry, protests, interrupting things. This one seems like it's been a little more sane in a certain way, a little more straightforward from Microsoft's perspective.
Yeah, so this year, the whole point of Build this year is it was a smaller sort of intimate venue in San Francisco. So they used to have Build at San Francisco, like I can't remember, it was many, many years ago now. There was a few protesters outside early yesterday morning. There's none today. But they didn't get inside this time. So there wasn't the sort of chaos that we had last year where the keynote was interrupted and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, the vibes definitely feels smaller and definitely more about getting actual developers in this time. I get the definite sense Microsoft is trying to use this year's Build.
to sort of stake its claim in the AI universe. There's a lot of stuff going on, and I want to get into some of it, but I'm curious what your sort of big picture takeaway is in terms of like, what does Microsoft want to be in a world filled with AI? I also spoke to Mustafa Suleiman yesterday, and he kind of took the gloves off, essentially, which I think, I get the sense that he's been wanting to do that for a little while. But just basically said, we want to be one of the top four AI model. creating frontier models in the world. I think we haven't heard them say that exactly before because they've had that really close open AI partnership. So I think that was a big part of Build this year. It was the coming out party for Microsoft AI and the models and stuff. They had like seven models. So that was a big chunk. But then on the flip side, I think the other thing is there was a big presence of Windows again, which I kind of think they had to have. But also in the sense of positioning Windows to developers as being able to have this local AI compute so they don't have to worry about the tokens, which is the kind of era that we're getting into now. It's like...
It's the cost of AI now, right? And all the token usage, and that's really bubbling up in the news cycle at the moment. Let's start with the AI stuff, because I think this question of can Microsoft be the fourth big player in this space, right? Obviously, it's Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI are like, it's those three, BigGap, everybody else. Microsoft, sort of in an awkward way, was tied to OpenAI, and I think they've broken up in sort of, you know, they claim it's on good terms, but it actually increasingly seems like these two companies really hate each other and are desperate to get away from each other.
And is this, did this feel to you like Microsoft sort of laying out its own full plan on how to do this? Because, you know, they put out an operating system for AI agents. They shipped a bunch of like developer tools for terminal. It really did feel like Microsoft being like, well, all this other stuff has been happening. We did all these partnerships with OpenAI, but we now have a whole plan of Microsoft's to take on all of these companies all at the same time. Do you feel like Microsoft successfully made that case?
Yeah, I think so to some extent. I think the Microsoft AI stuff, they obviously had seven models. And again, they were kind of like the smaller models, but then they had the reasoning one, which I think that's definitely a step forward from what they've been doing before. Because typically it's been very focused on specific tasks, whether it be like images or like transcription, all that sort of stuff. But this reasoning and the thinking model is a lot about math and code, right? Which is where they've kind of been falling behind. So like cloud code and cursor and all the rest of those coding tools. So I think they've definitely put...
a stake there. They want to, you know, they want to go aggressively after coding. And I think Microsoft was early to, right? They were early to, right? Yeah. Github Copilot stuff was way ahead of a lot of this stuff and then Microsoft got kind of left behind by the state of the art here. Yeah, exactly. So I think they're trying to reverse that trend. They've successfully done that, I think, the first step. It's just the question of where they go next. And I've seen him stuff has said that they want to be the top four. How they go about that is going to be very interesting. He actually said also to me that they're going to lean on OpenAI for the next few years, right?
because obviously they've got access to their models for quite some years yet. So they can lean on them for certain stuff whilst they basically compete and then build their own. So that's kind of an interesting perspective, which is unusual to hear that from an executive, to be honest. But it's kind of what we fought all along anyway, really, isn't it? But yeah, I think they've definitely started to shift the sort of message around AI now. Funny thing about the whole keynote, I think Copilot was only mentioned five times.
Without it being GitHub Copilot. Yeah, that's the one thing out of the keynote. The Copilot was barely mentioned. They announced the Surface laptops. They're Copilot plus PCs. They didn't even say Copilot plus PCs. They're very much trying to clean up that, trying to shove Copilot everywhere. So, okay, you just made a thing make sense for me that I was actually going to ask you about, which is Scout. This is one of Microsoft's biggest announcements was this thing, Scout, that is this sort of agentic, like Spark, OpenClaw-ish model. It seems like if you're Microsoft, this is a huge...
place to try and do some of your own stuff, right? And we've talked a lot about the advantages that Google has an AI where it makes a lot of apps that people use. It has a lot of data about people. Microsoft has exactly the same thing going on for like every company everywhere. So the idea of being able to do an AI agent that sort of knows you and your business makes tons of sense. And my immediate response is, isn't this exactly Copilot? Why on earth is this not just Copilot? But maybe you just answered that question. So the real interesting insight into this is that Copilot is run out of a different organization to where Microsoft Scout came from. What they also did is they announced...
a co-pilot sort of super app or autopilots is what they're called. And then it kind of shoved Microsoft Scout inside of there. But that thing does not exist. It's just a mock-up. The source is telling me it literally doesn't exist. They've just created this image, essentially. So there's obviously some internal politics going on here because the Scout stuff is on the other side of the house. But it is essentially supposed to be your sort of personal system, right? Like OpenGlaw. It's literally OpenGlaw, but for the enterprise. Do you think Copilot is like a lightly toxic brand at this point? I mean, you've covered a lot, the sort of relentless encroaching of Copilot into everything. And Microsoft sort of way overplayed its hand and has spent some time winding that back, getting Copilot out of things.
Is it possible that it's just, it's so overextended Copilot that it now has a branding problem that it's going to kind of slowly try to walk away from? Yeah, I think that's definitely what's happening. There's no doubt about that. I would say it's like necessarily toxic, but I think it's just, they didn't really have focus with it. They just started to use Copilot everywhere. The first was obviously GitHub Copilot and then Microsoft kind of like borrowed that, stole it, whatever you want to call it. It just ended with like Copilot buttons in like paint and in notepad and just all this like craziness. So I think they're definitely walking back like where Copilot shows up and to make it more like how that super app is. So they're going to sort of get all those things that they've done and put them all into this single app.
But yeah, they definitely have a branding problem with it. So the other thing I'm curious about is Project Solara, which I think to me is like the, you know, sort of consumer products person. This is the thing I found most interesting from the whole thing is this, they built a new operating system for agents essentially, right? And this is like, this is the big open question right now is if you believe that AI agents are going to be foundational to how we use computers going forward, what are our computers supposed to look like? And this is obviously, this is part of the NVIDIA RTX Spark question. And if you're Microsoft, it's very important that you get this right. Because if you get it wrong,
Windows goes away, right? This becomes sort of existential in a way. Can you explain sort of what Solara is and what you thought of these demos? I'm curious what they've structured. Yeah, so it's built on the Android open source project. So they've basically fought that and it's essentially going to be a platform for agents across devices. So we've seen Microsoft do this sort of platform play.
multiple times in the past. A lot of times it's always been Windows, but you've seen Microsoft Band, HoloLens, Windows Phone, obviously. They've always tried to position themselves as a platform for future hardware, and it hasn't gone well. So I'm very skeptical of it, but I'm also intrigued by it. But I think the most curious thing about it is that they're positioning it as a platform that runs across the devices like they showed a badge concept, which is like your security card.
where you could touch a button, it would transcribe and all that sort of done, use a camera. And then you've got this like Amazon Echo Show sort of like device that just scans your face, logs you in and you've got your agent. I think they're not going to make those devices themselves. They're sort of trying to position this as we are going to be on the platform, secure, et cetera, for enterprise use and all that sort of stuff. But it just depends, are people going to, you know, use that platform on their devices? That's the big question. Yeah, I think that there are so many sort of ongoing questions about like what...
what is Microsoft trying to be in this space again, right? Like, is it happy if all of it runs on Azure but not on Windows? I don't know. I just, but I will say, I thought the badge concept ruled. Like, again, this idea of if you're Microsoft and you're trying to think, okay, how do we get AI agentic wearables into people's lives in a way that is Microsoft-y? Doing it as an employee badge? Genius. Like,
perfect correct answer it's a thing tons of people are already wearing it's a thing they have on all the time and if you can give it some of this sort of input ability like there was a demo where it's a person standing over some kind of piece of paper pointing the camera at it that's on it's on their badge and it's inputting that way you can use it as a voice recorder it can it can display information like again thousands of caveats this is just it's this is essentially like a science fiction concept video but that to me was one of the moments where i was like this is the most complete thought from microsoft about how a microsoft led ai thing might work that i've seen yet and there was just something about that that i found very compelling from Microsoft in particular. It was like, oh, maybe this company gets what they're going for now. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think the badge concept was super interesting. I think it's just, where does it go from there? Like, they showed some other sort of vague devices, didn't they? Like, they obviously weren't focusing on, but I think it's, like, they tried this with Cortana. Do you remember? They had, like, thermostats, speakers, and obviously that was before, we called that, you know, that was machine learning back then, right? Now it's AI. But, yeah, that didn't really go anywhere, and they kind of abandoned that. So I'm just like, that's why I'm so skeptical, because I've seen them try and do this so many times in the past. But I think they have the right vision, but I worry that someone else will just do it.
It did seem to me that this build was, ironically for a developer conference, more developer focused than normal. And I think to some extent, this is what you're talking about at the beginning. Like ordinarily, they have lots of salespeople there and it's about sort of lots of people in lots of places. This felt very much like Microsoft recentering itself on developers. They spent a lot of time talking about Linux and the terminal and developer tools. Am I overthinking what happens at a developer conference here? Or does this feel like Microsoft actually refocusing its efforts on people who are this kind of developer that everybody is after in an AI world?
No, I think so. They've been trying to win back developers' trust and confidence in Windows in particular for quite some time now. Obviously, a lot of developers just use macOS, although they might be on Linux as well. They've been trying to get those people to take Windows seriously for development. They did the Windows subsystem for Linux many years ago, and they built on top of that build. A lot of the Windows announcements this year were very developer-focused. There pretty much wasn't anything outside of dev stuff, which I think is good because in some years...
over the past decade, they've gone very consumer heavy at Build. But they've done like the Terminal work as well in the past. And I think this year it felt like that kind of Build. Because I remember when they unveiled Terminal, like people were going nuts in the audience. Like it was genuine. It wasn't like Microsoft PR people screaming in the corner, you know? In a funny way, the world is coming around to Microsoft on that front, right? Like what we've seen is this giant push towards, you know, this is going to change the consumer landscape of everything. And then all of these AI companies kind of led by Anthropic, but OpenAI has caught up really fast and Google is now on this too. They've all realized that fundamentally this is business software and they're now trying to build it out as business software. And it feels like...
This is the thing that Microsoft in theory is very good at and is actually perfectly suited to capture is this idea of how do we bake AI into your business processes? Like no company is better set up to do that at scale than Microsoft. And I just got this sense of like, you and I talked many times about Microsoft's inability to help itself from trying to be a consumer company. It feels like if ever Microsoft is just going to confidently get back to being a business company, this is the time. Like it has a real shot at catching up very quickly if it can pull it off. Yeah, that's the thing.
It's almost like an existential crisis, isn't it, for Microsoft? Because if they don't pull this off, they have Office and Windows and all of this enterprise platform stuff like M365, etc. But that could all just disappear, right? It's not a guaranteed business anymore in this era where... A startup can just create something that just takes all that way. But that's what it's all about. They need to capture that audience they already have on the enterprise and get them using their own tools before they run off to use someone else's. And there's been obviously friction internally with the OpenAI stuff where they've been competing. They've been on this weird path where they're sort of trying to get the same sort of customers. And I think if there's ever a time when they need to make this work, it's right now for sure.
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I do want to talk about the sort of one consumer thing going at Microsoft right now, which is Xbox. I've been meaning to have you on for a while to talk about the current state of Xbox because there's a lot changing really fast. We're about three months or so into the Asha Sharma run at the top of Xbox after this giant shakeup. Xbox is now Xbox, all caps, which I hate with every fiber of my being. I was going to say, you don't have to say Xbox, so I'll just shout out. Yeah, it's the Xbox team now. Give me the readout so far. What are the vibes like? How are we feeling about the Asha Sharma era at Xbox so far?
Yeah, I think at the moment it's still early days, right? But she's doing all the right things, right? As you would want to do to focus on the fans, right? She's trying to win back that sort of set of people initially. So I think she's setting up this feedback framework so that fans can be like, oh, we want this, which is predominantly we want exclusives back. That's the main message from fans, which is not too surprising, I guess. And also dropping the Microsoft Gaming name that they used internally. All that sort of stuff does kind of put it back, the focus on Xbox. And I think it's more important for employees, really. I've heard over the last two years that people have been pretty...
pretty upset with Xbox and working there and stuff, a lot of folks. But I think that is starting to slowly turn. So the people that were saying a lot back to me are now saying, well, there's a little bit of hope, you know, like Asha gets it. She's listening to the right people. And she has, obviously, Satya Nadella and Amy Hood, the CFO, have obviously given her a bit of runway, like a bit of leeway to sort of not have those strict margins, which I think undermined Xbox the last couple of years. So she's got a bit more free reign to perhaps do some stuff. Yeah, give me your sense of what that looks like and kind of what the road is sort of pointing to. She's done a lot of very smart work.
cleaning up branding, right? Like getting rid of Microsoft gaming and just calling it Xbox. Extremely good idea. And there is definitely a sort of simplification of what Microsoft is doing here. I can't quite figure out if her vision for what gamers do and this sort of like everything is an Xbox where Game Pass is the future, streaming is the future, consoles don't really matter, every game should be everywhere. Like Phil Spencer's idea of what it meant to be a gamer is very different than a lot of people have had. Is your sense that Asha Sharma is going to change that in a meaningful way or just kind of focus in that same direction?
Yeah, that's the big question. A lot of the strategy stuff sounds a lot like it was before, playing everywhere. So it's not too dissimilar. I think it's just more the way that they executed that before. This is an Xbox and it's like a phone and a laptop. The average consumer will look at that commercial and go, huh? That's not an Xbox. An Xbox goes underneath my TV. So they still have that sort of perception to get over if they want to make the cloud stuff work and all that sort of stuff. But I think it's more the execution now that's going to be a bit different on the strategy. I think we're still waiting to hear a little bit more clearer from Asher on the strategy. I mean, that's one thing that's probably...
been lacking somewhat um and it could be more like the obvious things like fixing the branding she's doing at the moment right so um but it's like that's the right way to spend your first 90 days is just doing a lot of things that didn't make sense that now you're making them make sense that goes a very long way yeah it's been rapid but like yeah it does like what you're probably what you're about to say is what's the long-term strategy right like where does this go you have to tell me what i'm going to buy from you right exactly i don't know that I have tons of clarity on that question. No, and you've got Project Helix, the next-gen console that's kind of like looming in the background there. But then Azure's doing a bunch of console work, like doing a lot of console features. So why would you spend engineer time doing all that sort of stuff if you're going to dump that sort of OS at some point and just go to some sort of Windows with Xbox and stuff? And there's a lot of open questions about the future, for sure. Microsoft seems to be clearly...
turned back toward the Xbox a little bit, right? I think we spent a long time asking, like, is this even worth being an ongoing concern inside of Microsoft as it pivots away to being a different kind of company? It does seem to me that there is all this going on and it is increasingly far away from everything else that Microsoft talks about, which is essentially just AI, AI, AI, AI, AI. Like, Microsoft believes itself to be an AI powerhouse with a sort of, not middling, but not like massively successful gaming company on the side. Do you feel like those things can coexist? Are they going to coexist in Microsoft? It's always been the trouble with Xbox. The way it started initially was an incubation project, right? And trying to put Windows in delivery, essentially. It's always been this weird thing at Xbox. But I think they've had the realization over the past year or so that this is their last major consumer-facing brand, right? Surface has still got a foot in the consumer side, but it's still primarily they're sending those devices to businesses, to be honest. There's that realization that they need to...
not be so focused on the margins, which has kind of caused them to do weird things over the past couple of years. And sort of, return of Xbox. Obviously, I don't know. Xbox is always back. You know what I mean? Like, somehow it's always coming back. I don't know where it went. There's this meme from the Xbox fans. It's like a graph and it's like this. And it's like, we're so back. And then, oh, we're doomed. We're so back. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's Xbox. All right, one more thing before I let you go. Back to build.
There was a lot of talk all week about the NVIDIA RTX Spark stuff. And I think the sort of flagship hardware we've seen so far has been from Microsoft. They have the Surface Laptop Ultra. They have this new Spark dev box. What do you make here of Microsoft's hardware ambitions with NVIDIA? What's going on here? Yeah, I was quite surprised to see them do both of these devices. I think we kind of assumed they'd do a laptop, right? I mean, all the rumors of NVIDIA's AI chips. So yeah, I played around with the Laptop Ultra and it is pretty much a 16-inch MacBook Pro.
It is a MacBook Pro. And you know that they've done the Surface Book in the past with the detachable display. They've done the Laptop Studio where it lays flat into a tablet. They've done all these quirky things, but it looks like they're just going back to the laptop formula because that works. But I think that the most curious thing about them is who they're targeting. They're really going for developers and creators with these, which they tried a little bit Windows 10 Creators Update. They briefly sort of scouted with that. But this seems like a good time.
to have these sort of devices. I think they struck like almost the perfect time. It's whether they can be good enough to be able to do everything the developers want to do without having to touch those sort of cloud-powered models. But I think that's the most interesting part of these devices to me is exactly how performant are they and exactly how well these local AI models will run. Yeah. I have absolutely no professional need for the Surface Laptop Ultra. And yet I still found myself, I've loved the Surface Laptop since all the way back to like the red Alcantara days. I thought that was a great laptop and that Microsoft should put more into it. So the idea of like an outrageously overpowered high-end Surface Laptop gets me very excited. I'm sure it's going to cost a million dollars. I have no need for it.
But I'm thrilled that it exists. I swear that thing's going to start at $3,000. But I'm the same. I'm like, I don't need it, but I want it. Yeah, agreed. All right, Tom, get home safe. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on, Ben. Appreciate it. All right, I'll speak soon. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Tom for being here. And thank you, as always, for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, feelings, questions, feedback, strong opinions about Copilot, I want to hear all of it. Email us, vergecast at theverge.com or call the vergecast hotline at 866-VERGE-11. We read it all. We listen to it all. We love hearing from you. As always, a reminder, the best thing you can do to support everything The Verge is up to and get all of our podcasts ad-free...
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