Five Major Announcements from Microsoft at Build 2024

Five Major Announcements

Coding agent : GitHub Copilot is upgraded from a "pair programmer" to a "peer programmer" and now appears as a full coding agent embedded in GitHub that can be assigned tasks such as bug fixing, new feature development, or ongoing maintenance and complete them autonomously.

Copilot Tuning : Copilot can now learn a company’s unique tone and language style, extracting proprietary knowledge and amplifying it for all users.

Agent factory (Foundry) : A complete application platform for building apps and agents, adding support for models from Grok, Hugging Face, Meta, Mistral, etc., plus Azure AI Search retrieval, Foundry agent services, integration with Copilot Studio, and enterprise identity, management, and security tools. Example: the NFL uses Foundry for its recent combine.

NLWeb : An open project that lets users interact with any website using natural language, described as the HTML of an agent network.

Microsoft Discovery : An integrated stack that accelerates scientific research by using agents to generate ideas, run simulations, and learn. Example: discovery of a promising cooling‑agent candidate that avoids “forever chemicals”.

VS Code: Open‑Source AI Editor

Microsoft announced plans to turn VS Code into an open‑source AI‑enabled editor, keeping the core principles of openness, collaboration, and community‑driven development.

They will open‑source the code of the GitHub Copilot Chat extension and refactor its AI components into the VS Code core, arguing that AI‑powered tools are now central to how developers write code and that open collaboration yields better products.

Why open source now?

Large language models have advanced, reducing the need for “secret‑prompt engineering”.

Effective AI UX patterns are now common across editors, and exposing them in a stable, open codebase lets the community improve them.

An ecosystem of open‑source AI tools and VS Code extensions has emerged; open source will make building, debugging, and testing extensions easier.

Open‑sourcing Copilot Chat will increase transparency about data collection.

Open‑source issue and PR processes help quickly discover and fix security problems posed by malicious actors targeting AI development tools.

Next steps

In the coming weeks Microsoft will open‑source the Copilot Chat extension code and move AI functionality into the VS Code core, prioritising performance, extensibility, and an intuitive UI.

They will also open‑source their prompt‑testing infrastructure to help the community validate AI features despite the randomness of large language models.

Other Major News

GitHub Copilot now includes a built‑in coding agent that runs in a secure sandbox, clones repositories, configures environments, and uses RAG‑powered code search.

Video‑analysis AI agents are emerging; companies such as Pegatron, Linker Vision, VAST Data, and Siemens use generative AI for large‑scale video observation, search, and summarisation. NVIDIA has released a video‑search and content‑extraction AI blueprint.

Bilibili released Index‑AniSora, an open‑source anime video generation model supporting multiple styles.

Tencent launched QBot in QQ Browser, an AI browser powered by the Mixtral model and DeepSeek, offering AI search, browsing, office, learning, and writing capabilities.

Tencent unveiled Mixtral Image 2.0, a model delivering real‑time, photorealistic image generation.

Meta published the OMol25 dataset and a Universal Atom Model (UMA) trained on over 30 billion atoms for molecular simulations.

Microsoft Research introduced Magentic‑UI, an open‑source, human‑centered AI‑agent prototype for collaborative web‑based tasks, available via Azure AI Foundry Labs.

Microsoft and NVIDIA partnered to integrate NVIDIA ALCHEMI NIM and BioNeMo NIM micro‑services into Microsoft Discovery, accelerating materials and drug discovery.