View / AI is evolving past hardware

Microsoft’s AI chief is in the middle of the greatest game of catch-up ever played.

“We are one of the largest tech companies in the world, and we have the resources to make sure that we do catch up,” Mustafa Suleyman, executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, told me in an interview ahead of this week’s Build conference (which is dominating tech news, as you’ll see below).

There’s no doubt Microsoft is behind. But as it rushes to build its own frontier AI models, custom accelerator chips and high-performing “harnesses” that compete with those made by Cursor, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, something else caught my eye this week: A hardware platform it’s building on Android and designing for the AI era.

Called Project Solara, it’s built on the idea that as AI takes over, hardware needs to change. The apps and proprietary software that control our devices are already outdated.

Take my AI exercise tracking app (OK, it’s a personal trainer I named Arnold). I wanted to give Arnold access to my scale to track body fat percentage, but the scale doesn’t have a public API so there was no way to do that automatically. So I jury-rigged a system to email the scale readings from its proprietary app — and then I built my own app to replace it. I ran into similar roadblocks with my smartwatch.

The problem goes beyond hardware. The calorie-tracking app I used also didn’t have an easy way to interface with Arnold, so I switched to a new app that does.

These are not everyday user problems yet, but they will be. This kind of thing has only really been possible for people like me (with zero technical experience) since early this year. As it spreads, and everybody is building their own custom software, they won’t want to use the subpar, walled-off apps that hardware companies offer. They’ll want to use their own.

Even if Project Solara doesn’t succeed, something like it probably will. And eventually, every hardware product will be something that AI-created software controls. Companies, engineers, and entrepreneurs still holding on to the idea that they can retain a tight grip on how people use their products are going to become obsolete.