Microsoft Build ‘25 focuses on agentic AI

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Microsoft Build ‘25 unveils major focus on agentic AI + OpenAI launches Codex AI-powered coding agent

💰 Funding: Salesforce and Cohere both acquire AI companies

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. At Microsoft Build 2025, the company unveiled a major push toward “agentic AI” with updates across GitHub, Azure, Windows, and Microsoft 365 to empower developers and organizations to create intelligent agents. 

Here are some of the major announcements:

• Microsoft’s NLWeb initiative, introduces a radically open, low-cost protocol to empower any website or app with conversational AI search capabilities—shifting control from centralized chatbots to individual publishers.

• AI-powered APIs for Edge that allow developers to build smarter web apps using the on-device Phi 4 mini model for tasks like math solving, writing assistance, and translation — all while preserving user privacy.

• Microsoft Discovery, an extensible agentic AI platform designed to accelerate scientific research through end-to-end support for hypothesis generation, simulations, and analysis — aiming to outperform previous, underwhelming attempts at AI-driven discovery.

• Microsoft open sourced several key developer tools including a new command-line text editor called Edit, GitHub Copilot’s VS Code integration, and the Windows Subsystem for Linux, reflecting a strategic move to support developer customization and innovation through open source.

• GitHub Copilot is evolving into an asynchronous AI coding partner along with now being open-source in VS Code

• Microsoft and GitHub have joined Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) steering committee and are embedding the standard across Windows and Azure, allowing AI models to securely interact with app functions and data sources, while also contributing an authorization spec and a centralized server registry to support broad developer adoption.

• Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models are coming to Azure AI Foundry with enhanced enterprise controls, offering customers moderated access to the controversial AI in a managed, compliant environment with Microsoft-billed support.

• Azure AI Foundry and the new Windows AI Foundry provide a unified platform for training, fine-tuning, and deploying models

• Magentic-UI is a prototype for collaborative, human-in-the-loop web agents

2. OpenAI has launched Codex, a powerful AI coding agent integrated into ChatGPT and powered by the codex-1 model, offering GitHub-connected automation for software tasks in a secure environment.

3. Google has launched mobile versions of its AI research tool NotebookLM for Android and iOS, bringing features like smart document summaries, share-to-notebook tools, and offline podcast-style “Audio Overviews”.

4. OpenAI is anchoring a 5-gigawatt, 10-square-mile AI data center in Abu Dhabi with partner G42—surpassing its U.S. Stargate site and sparking geopolitical scrutiny due to G42’s previous China ties

5. President Trump signed the Take It Down Act, the first U.S. federal law criminalizing the distribution of both real and AI-generated nonconsensual explicit images—including deepfakes—imposing strict penalties and requiring platforms to swiftly remove such content.

6. Intel has launched its new Arc Pro B50 and B60 AI workstation GPUs and a powerful PC system called Project Battlematrix in a bold attempt to reclaim market share from Nvidia and AMD by targeting on-premise, cost-effective AI processing for engineering and business applications.

7. China has demanded the U.S. reverse its new restrictions on Chinese AI chips, particularly Huawei's Ascend line, calling them discriminatory and a violation of a recent trade truce, while warning of retaliatory measures if Washington continues to harm Chinese tech interests.

8. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang denounced U.S. export controls on AI chips as a “failure” that halved the company’s China market share and accelerated domestic Chinese chip development, while blasting the now-revoked AI diffusion rule as a misguided policy that stifled U.S. innovation.

9. Apple is set to let developers build on its in-house AI models at WWDC 2025, launching a new framework to integrate Apple Intelligence into apps across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS as it works to compete more aggressively in the AI arena.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Salesforce is acquiring UK-based Convergence.ai to supercharge its Agentforce platform with adaptive, human-like AI agents capable of navigating complex digital workflows, while also establishing a major AI R\&D hub in London to drive innovation across automation and enterprise productivity.

2. AI firm Cohere has acquired market research platform Ottogrid to integrate its document analysis and smart table tools into North, its ChatGPT-style assistant, aiming to boost productivity for enterprise knowledge workers amid a strategic shift to private AI deployments.

3. Moonvalley, which builds a legally compliant AI video generator for professional creatives, raised $53M from 14 undisclosed investors, bringing total funding to approximately $124M.

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