Microsoft's Project Solara Is an OS For Devices That Run AI Agents Instead of Apps (geekwire.com) 45
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: A team inside Microsoft has been quietly building a platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps, based on Android instead of Windows, with two working hardware designs so far, and an initial set of big-name companies lined up to run pilots. The platform, dubbed "Project Solara," is Microsoft's bet that AI will open up entirely new scenarios for computing -- using agents to avoid the constraints of traditional software, and off-the-shelf components to develop new devices quickly and inexpensively. [...] The company unveiled Solara on Tuesday at its Build conference in San Francisco, describing it as a new platform that spans from chip to cloud. GeekWire got a behind-the-scenes look at the project during a briefing last week in Redmond, including demos of the first two concept devices based on the platform:
- A desktop hub that sits beside a PC and responds to voice commands, signs users in using facial recognition, and surfaces the day's most pressing items. With a monitor attached, it becomes a full Windows machine running in the cloud.
- A wearable badge that reimagines the standard employee ID card. A fingerprint button wakes an agent in one press; a single tap records and transcribes a conversation; and a built-in camera lets the agent act on what the user sees.
Microsoft says it won't ship these devices itself. Instead, it envisions hardware makers and other industry partners turning the reference designs into implementations of their own, each intended for a specific industry, company, or scenario. For example, in one demo shown by the company, the high-tech badge ran on agents designed for use by a health-care worker, including the ability to scan a patient's QR code, record and transcribe the visit, log vitals, and start a prescription. In another application of the same badge, the built-in camera scanned a brainstorm board with ideas for an office revamp, and made a suggestion: add some plants.
The two devices are a starting point. The bigger opportunity, the company says, is all the tasks and workflows where a PC or phone gets in the way or isn't practical to use. [...] In the coming months, companies including AccuWeather, Best Buy, CVS Health, Levi's, and Target are expected to begin pilots of devices based on the reference designs. The operating system is the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform, or MDEP, an enterprise version of Android that Microsoft developed for devices including Teams meeting-room hardware. The company says it chose MDEP over Windows deliberately, to run on smaller, lower-power devices while keeping the management and security features IT departments expect: patch and over-the-air updates, device integrity, Microsoft Defender, Intune, and Entra ID sign-in. While the project is still in the early stages, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella encouraged the team to show it at Build sooner than the company would normally show its work in public. "That underscores just how competitive and fast-moving the AI world is right now, but it also illustrates the pace that the new technologies are enabling," reports GeekWire.
The report notes that the business model for the platform still needs to be worked out. The devices run on Microsoft's Azure cloud, but beyond that, "the economics are still taking shape."
Qualcomm and MediaTek have been chosen as the first chip partners. "The badge runs on a new Qualcomm wearable chip; the desk hub runs on MediaTek IoT silicon," reports GeekWire. "Both are off-the-shelf, not custom, which is central to how Microsoft plans to keep devices cheap and fast to build."
- A desktop hub that sits beside a PC and responds to voice commands, signs users in using facial recognition, and surfaces the day's most pressing items. With a monitor attached, it becomes a full Windows machine running in the cloud.
- A wearable badge that reimagines the standard employee ID card. A fingerprint button wakes an agent in one press; a single tap records and transcribes a conversation; and a built-in camera lets the agent act on what the user sees.
Microsoft says it won't ship these devices itself. Instead, it envisions hardware makers and other industry partners turning the reference designs into implementations of their own, each intended for a specific industry, company, or scenario. For example, in one demo shown by the company, the high-tech badge ran on agents designed for use by a health-care worker, including the ability to scan a patient's QR code, record and transcribe the visit, log vitals, and start a prescription. In another application of the same badge, the built-in camera scanned a brainstorm board with ideas for an office revamp, and made a suggestion: add some plants.
The two devices are a starting point. The bigger opportunity, the company says, is all the tasks and workflows where a PC or phone gets in the way or isn't practical to use. [...] In the coming months, companies including AccuWeather, Best Buy, CVS Health, Levi's, and Target are expected to begin pilots of devices based on the reference designs. The operating system is the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform, or MDEP, an enterprise version of Android that Microsoft developed for devices including Teams meeting-room hardware. The company says it chose MDEP over Windows deliberately, to run on smaller, lower-power devices while keeping the management and security features IT departments expect: patch and over-the-air updates, device integrity, Microsoft Defender, Intune, and Entra ID sign-in. While the project is still in the early stages, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella encouraged the team to show it at Build sooner than the company would normally show its work in public. "That underscores just how competitive and fast-moving the AI world is right now, but it also illustrates the pace that the new technologies are enabling," reports GeekWire.
The report notes that the business model for the platform still needs to be worked out. The devices run on Microsoft's Azure cloud, but beyond that, "the economics are still taking shape."
Qualcomm and MediaTek have been chosen as the first chip partners. "The badge runs on a new Qualcomm wearable chip; the desk hub runs on MediaTek IoT silicon," reports GeekWire. "Both are off-the-shelf, not custom, which is central to how Microsoft plans to keep devices cheap and fast to build."
Tay on her own (mobile) device (Score:2)
what could go wrong?
I've been rather OS agnostic over the years (Score:5, Insightful)
but I don't think there's a literally single OS I'd be less happy about being on my computer than this.
I'm excited for agents and I've been toying with them, but Microsoft's walled garden of garbage that they'll figure out 18 different ways to rugpull features out of and resell them back to you later is the worst possible idea for something future looking like this.
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but Microsoft's walled garden of garbage
Don't get too excited. You can expect any commercial product to a walled shitbucket chasing your captive attention.
Bold move, Cotton (Score:2)
so their product shelf life has taken a shit recently and they think it's time to launch a new line of AI products... how much goodwill can a macroshaft burn when a microstiff wants to burn customers?
Well, it's not on Windows... (Score:3)
I think there is increasing internal pressure inside Microsoft to leave Windows (and to an lesser extent) Office alone when it comes to AI. The pushback is growing from the userbase who just want to get things done.
Of course, AI bubble feeding Azure is also a thing. So, probably a good thing that somebody at Microsoft said "Android seems like a better bet for this" and the Windows group just nodded in agreement.
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I think there is increasing internal pressure inside Microsoft to leave Windows
There is not. There may be some user complaints but Microsoft's approach to this is window-dressing and marketing. E.g. how they said they removed CoPilot from Notepad and proceeded to simply renamed it to "Writing tools"
Also it doesn't really make much sense. AI has a use case at an OS level to provide cross app integration. Now I don't intend to use it, but the use case exists for it. I see no reason why there would be any internal pressure for Micro-"We'll put a special copilot key on your keyboard and i
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Its been about having windows capable devices all over your home that will communicate their needs through a central controller. Windows phones failed because they didn't have that and Bill Gates said as much.
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As far as leaving Windows/Office alone? The opposite will happen. It will become a listening set of processes you cant turn off completely. Then it will make all end user products even more of a network client install. With a seperate dedicated gateway device and domain controller there is no reason to continue with the classic end user native OS.
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It goes actually the other way.
The big competitor for MS Office "in the web" is google with its GSuite. And there is Gemini fully integrated.
Many "interesting" office automations are done with AI, instead of scripts.
MS will try to jump onto that wagon, too.
Re: Solara (Score:2)
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Yes. And it was an early choice of platform for among other things, domain controllers and routers......
Combines my favorite things (Score:3)
It sounds slow, expensive, and invasive.
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That is because it is designed to be used by slow, expensive, and invasive people.
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Microsoft Commbadge basically (Score:2)
Inevitable (Score:2)
Computers didn't start with apps. At first they ran 'programs' with no OS at all. Having computation evolve around the statistical inference model of LLMs is just the next step in that progression.
It also happens to be a wet dream for tech company leaders. An OS that runs on buzzwords? That will attract humongous financing until some engineers find a way to make something that actually resembles the premise; at which point the tech lead gets saluted as a visionary by their fellow millionaires
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The world is a confusing place for people who never learned statistics.
Microsoft's there's an app for that moment (Score:2)
I don't want this. And a lot of these things can be done without "agents".
But it looks like someone at MS realized they can have their own "app for that" moment only this time they embed into every workflow.
The one things that looked like it had AI in it? The thing that looks at a whiteboard and suggests to add plants. But.. that is something the human is supposed to do, not an AI. Though Claude would probably also recommend to add plants.. especially if we gave him a rover with a camera.. or plugged him in
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It's a shame finding news articles relevant to a story was impossible prior to now. All those years wasted unable to find a cite with no tools available to help us search the Internet.
An OS is still an OS... (Score:4, Informative)
Unless Microsoft is moving to a new CPU architecture (Harvard architecture would be nice, but the NX bit does almost a good enough job with machines,) we are going still have hardware, the ISA, the hypervisor, the mysterious stuff that runs in ring -1 and -2 placed there by the local governments, maybe a hypervisor, the OS, then apps. Yes, we can merge an app with the OS, but even in the Apple 2 days, that was a lot of work, especially with dealing with low level I/O.
So, this means we have an OS created that has a fast path to the matrix multiplication (with carry) on the cores, with the OS as small as possible. Assuming that they will turn their noses up at BSD and Linux kernels, there is always QNX.
At the filesystem level, TernFS is what some banking industries are using at the exascale. It doesn't have permissions and such as a normal filesystem, but designed to handle data on a large scale. Might as well go with this.
For RAM, I've seen some devices that actually use the GPU's VRAM as a swap device and balloon into that.
Overall, the "AI OS" may not be true realtime, but it can help, but it needs to be able to reassign resources as need be, be it using Optane-tier storage (if it exists at all), and the OS is focused on quickly getting software requests to the cores that handle the matrix and tensor manipulation.
If it were up to me, I'd not bother writing another OS. Just using Linux and contributing mainline kernel patches would more than pay for itself, especially when the mainline patches become part of LTS distributions. If designing a hardware architecture just for AI was fundamentally so different that conventional OS kernels couldn't be used, then see about a Linux emulator so people could port tools to the OS and cross-compile. An OS needs to be able to run gcc natively, or it is not going to last long.
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'an enterprise version of Android', basically this announcement is an SDK for embedded devices.
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With the separation of L1 cache into data cache and instruction cache, every modern CPU is effectively Harvard architecture.
The Minix in the Intel CPU was put there by Intel, not by any government. (I suspect that Intel use it to spy on the NSA.)
Merging an app with the OS, that's what Microsoft tried with the Internet Explorer. It did not end well for them.
Effectively, half of Microsoft Office is baked into Windows, especially the parts that date from the MS-DOS days. (The "if Lotus will run, DOS is not
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> With the separation of L1 cache into data cache and instruction cache, every modern CPU is effectively Harvard architecture.
The CPU itself is still using a model that combines data and instructions, it's just caches are introduced with a lot of intermediate logic so that the performance takes advantage of HA. That's not the same as being HA, any more than having VLIWs in microcode makes something RISC. (Cue thousands responding with "Nu-uh!" despite this being actually how CPUs have pretty much always
So... An Alexa? (Score:1)
The Samed Old Trap (Score:1)
I'm actually gonna try and defend Microsoft here! (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong I think what Microsoft is doing is bad and fucking over their customers, but I have a strange feeling the certificate changeover is actually the result of an Apple policy, like I can see in this thread that people are still running ancient versions of Office 2011, and probably on ancient versions of Mac OS, but modern Mac OS is a bit of a security pig and you have to appease the
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>Posted in the wrong thread like a moron.
"Surfaces" the day's most pressing items (Score:2)
This use of "surface" seems to be a recent favorite of the PR droids... I've seen it multiple times this week for some reason.
It sounds pretentious and forced - it's quite annoying.
Remember when computers were made for people? (Score:2)
Now you cannot afford buying a decent computer, but don't worry, you'll be able to buy one for your agent to run and output tons of slop.
And yet, they cannot even do audio (Score:2)
Since the last win11 "update", I have audio disconnects both with analog and USB audio on two different installations. No issues ever before on these two systems, now standard for Teams and also games. And there is no simple way to diagnose the issue. Looking for fixes results in endless lists of obscure thigs to do or recommendations for option settings that do not exist. Disable/enable works, which nicely shows the OS is at fault.
MS is nothing but a bunch or fuckups. They have no business delivering any t
or just buy a.Mac Mini (Score:2)
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The real point.. (Score:2)
So they know damned well that a huge facet of technology is consistent, deterministic interfaces and behavior. Sure, there's a demand for AI to also provide more flexible interaction in some scenarios which is desired, but many scenarios are benefitted by the dependable interaction of apps.
So on the face of it, the concept of a platform that is a strict subset of the capabilities of platforms already out there (the "app" devices are plenty capable of running the "AI" interfaces) is dumb. This has proven ou
Microsoft Digital Panopticon :o (Score:2)
“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power”
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Gemini [i.ibb.co]:
Q: Give me a similar quote but not from Michel Foucault: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power.
Uh oh (Score:1)
CEO's wet dream (Score:2)
An OS that is only capable of running software that requires an expensive ongoing cloud subscription? Sounds like a CEO's wet dream to me
So you'll need ... (Score:2)
How Microsoft Threw Away an Empire (Score:2)