Microsoft says it built the model “from scratch” with “no distillation” of rival models – a common shortcut that involves copying a competitor’s outputs to train a new system more cheaply and quickly.
The tool, still limited to a select group of customers, arrives roughly a year-and-a-half behind pioneers such as OpenAI and Google.
Microsoft also unveiled other in-house models for generating images, transcribing audio, creating synthetic voices and coding.
Joining the broader Silicon Valley craze, the group aims to ride the wave of so-called “agentic” AI, which has moved the technology beyond a simple chatbot to one that acts on your behalf.
It unveiled Microsoft Scout, an “always-on” assistant – for preparing meetings, managing schedules and drafting emails – based on OpenClaw, the open-source software whose global popularity launched this wave in late 2025.
Scout is available only to a limited circle of customers. Last week, Google unveiled its own autonomous agent, Gemini Spark, reserved for its premium US subscribers.
Microsoft also announced an Nvidia-powered mini-PC, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, capable of running AI models offline, as well as an AI platform dedicated to scientific research.
– AFP