Microsoft introduced MAI-Thinking-1, a 35B parameter MoE model with 256K context, achieving 97% on AIME 2025 and outperforming Sonnet 4.6 in human preference tests. The broader 7-model MAI family spans reasoning, code, image, speech, and voice, with third-party availability on OpenRouter, fal, and Baseten. The detailed 109-page technical report revealed insights on scaling, MFU, RL/post-training, and data curation, highlighting no third-party distillation and advanced prompt optimization techniques. Microsoft emphasized agent-native devices and local inference with projects like Project Solara / Scout and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, alongside software innovations such as the Copilot desktop app and MAI-Code-1-Flash integration.

Meanwhile, local-first computer-use agents like Holo 3.1 (Qwen-based, 0.8B to 35B parameters) support laptops and small workstations with optimized formats and strong benchmark results. Desktop shells for agents, including Hermes Desktop, Devin Desktop, and agent-neutral approaches compatible with Devin, Claude Code, and Codex, are proliferating, with hybrid local/cloud execution becoming the default architecture as seen in Perplexity Computer's hybrid…