From June 2 to 5, 2026, the Microsoft Build Developer Conference was held at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.
MAI-Thinking-1: Microsoft’s first inference model debuts
The most anticipated release of this build isMAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft’s first self-developed inference model.Claude Like Opus, MAI-Thinking-1 performs an internal chain of reasoning before answering and is good at mathematics, programming and logical analysis tasks.
For developers, this means that the Azure ecosystem finally has a platform that can work with GPT-5 andClaude Opus’ competitive “in-house reasoning brain” no longer needs to rely entirely on third-party models.
The MAI model family has been fully upgraded: three major modes: image, voice, and transcription.
Microsoft has simultaneously upgraded the first-generation MAI model released in April and launched three major upgrades:
- MAI-Image-2.5: A new generation of image generation and editing model, supporting Vincentian diagrams and image editing, which has been gradually launched in Bing, PowerPoint and Copilot.
- MAI-Voice-2: Supports multi-language voice cloning and text-to-speech, and now supports 15+ languages.
- MAI-Transcribe-1.5: Speech-to-text model, supports 43 languages, batch transcription speed is 2.5 times faster than Azure Fast, ranking first in FLEURS benchmark test.
These three models cover three high-frequency business scenarios: speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and image generation.
Microsoft Scout: Your personal AI working agent
Another notable release on Build isMicrosoft Scout, a personal AI agent for the workplace.
This is in direct competition with the "Gemini helps you book an appointment" function released by Google at the I/O conference.
Surface Ultra: a notebook built for local AI inference
In terms of hardware, Microsoft previewedSurface UltraNotebook designed for running large AI workloads locally.
Summary: Microsoft’s AI Declaration of Independence
Build 2026 is Microsoft’s “AI Declaration of Independence.”
For more AI tools and reviews, please visit AI Dash ——Discover the best AI tools.