Taylor Black

Director, AI & Venture Ecosystems @ CTO's Office @microsoft. Angel @ Fizzy Ventures. enjoys rabbit holes, etymological & #138BPM. peddler of hope.

[Taylor Black @pourbrew]

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, b/c in the last analysis all moments are key moments, & life itself is grace.

[Microsoft AI @MicrosoftAI]

Seven new models launching at Build: let’s go!
Reasoning. Code. Image. Transcribe. Voice.

Built from scratch on a clean data lineage, designed for efficiency, working seamlessly as a family of models

Thread 🧵

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Charity admits no delay. Our responsibility before those in need makes every encounter with others a unique and unrepeatable moment of grace for love, not to be missed or postponed. The love of Christ impels us toward our brothers and sisters, and the charity and care with which we respond are the test of our faith. #ApostolicJourney #Spain

[Ed. Condon @canonlawyered]

If the Cubs are going to play like they did in the 80s, the beer should be priced at Wrigley accordingly.

[Jonathan Liedl @JLLiedl]

At a rectory in Tulsa, 8 priests live under the same roof.

No, it's not religious life; instead, it's likely the largest community of active diocesan priests in the entire country. And it may offer insights into addressing an epidemic of clerical loneliness.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

The OpenAI Comms Comeback continues.

Viscerally putting humans in control and supercharging them.

[NeurIPS Conference @NeurIPSConf]

This year, the NeurIPS 2026 Position Paper Track made the decision to require that all papers be substantially human-written, with AI used for only copy-editing or similar peripheral changes to the main text!

For more details, please check our blogpost: https://t.co/wrWuMQJwrx

[Patrick T. Brown @PTBwrites]

Register here!! https://t.co/dLTCbYxOTZ

[Microsoft 365 @Microsoft365]

Meet Microsoft Scout.

An always-on agent that keeps work moving, taking action without needing to be prompted each time.

As Microsoft’s first Autopilot agent, Microsoft Scout works across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and more—taking action within the controls your organization sets.

Learn more: https://t.co/n8xTWVZA5P

[Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper]

I wrote about the Pope and why Christian tech critics often have a more compelling response to the AI crisis than their secular counterparts. Simply, Christian writers aren't afraid of "human nature" talk, and they understand THE question of the AI Age is: what are people for? 🧵

[Mustafa Suleyman @mustafasuleyman]

Super excited to announce seven new world-class MAI models today. They represent what we consider a new era in AI designed to keep you in control and on the frontier.
First is our text foundation model, MAI-Thinking-1, exceptionally strong on reasoning and SWE tasks.
- It’s a 35B active parameter MoE with a 256K context window. Independent human raters on Surge prefer it for overall quality in blind side-by-sides versus Sonnet 4.6, and it’s achieved 97% on AIME 2025, the key measure of its general-purpose reasoning abilities.
- It's at 53% on SWE Bench Pro, placing it right alongside Opus 4.6 on one of the toughest coding benchmarks.
- And since we co-designed our models with our own silicon, MAI-Thinking-1 is optimized on our MAIA 200 chip. Benchmarking head-to-head against the GB200, we see 30% better performance per dollar as well as a 1.4x performance-per-watt gain when running our MAI models on the MAIA 200 end-to-end.

Next is MAI-Image-2.5 and its Flash variant. Two super strong models now at #2 on the leaderboards, surpassing the score of Nano Banana 2 on image editing.

Last for now is MAI-Code-1-Flash, our new inference efficient coding model, especially tuned for VS Code and GitHub Copilot CLI.
- Code-1-Flash achieves 51% on SWE Bench Pro, despite having just 5B parameters, putting it closer to Haiku in size but cheaper in cost.

All of this is the foundation for Microsoft Frontier Tuning. It lets you customize our models to create custom, company-specific agents that only you control. You can make our model, your model. Your data. Your agents. Your moat.

Early adopters are already seeing a difference. When we tuned our models for McKinsey’s tasks, MAI delivered the highest win rate, outperforming GPT-5.5 on quality, while being 10x lower on cost.

Also really excited to be collaborating with the amazing team at Mayo Clinic to jointly train a new frontier AI model for healthcare.

Our announcements today mark another milestone on the road to humanist superintelligence. You can learn more and about our other new models in our latest blog: https://t.co/v65eop5Ixq

[Omar Shahine @OmarShahine]

Introducing Microsoft Scout, the first autopilot agent from Microsoft - 57 days after starting my new job, we are launching Microsoft Scout to our Frontier customers. Big day for the team and for @openclaw #MicrosoftBuild https://t.co/ZGl47ADnCg

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Sad to hear that Ada's Technical Books in Seattle is closing this week -- it's a wonderful bookstore. I always found something obscure but interesting when I visited.

https://t.co/T4FmebqXyw

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

For those who wants stats, rather than anecdotes https://t.co/iQDM5i2gDV

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I find debates over whether companies find AI useful to be odd at this point

I talk to leadership teams at lots of big firms, and it is pretty universal that they are getting obvious and real value. The challenges now are going from individual uses to firm-level & how to scale.

[Taylor Black @pourbrew]

Merely a director, not an executive but this statement is true.

[Jeffrey Bilbro @jeff_bilbro]

Good to see my old friend @pourbrew in our local paper this week.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.

In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:

- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors

This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

[Taylor Black @pourbrew]

@jeff_bilbro Yay! MSFT executive is a bit of an overstatement, merely a director, but press does what press does. :)

[Taylor Black @pourbrew]

@packyM I have not 🤣 they've really taken if though

[Taylor Black @pourbrew]

@packyM I used to rave with the founders

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

It’s Friday. Step away from your computer and prepare for cocktail hour.