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AI News Afternoon Briefing — Tuesday, June 2, 2026 at 3:00 PM

🧠 AI News PM6/2/2026🕐 3:00 PM⏱ 5:45AudioPM edition

Top stories, ranked by relevance.

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#2Build 2026: Microsoft's Project Polaris Ends GitHub Copilot's OpenAI Dependency

Microsoft unveiled Project Polaris at Build 2026, a homegrown mixture-of-experts model that replaces GPT-4 Turbo as GitHub Copilot's default engine by August 2026. Polaris outperforms GPT-4 Turbo on HumanEval and MBPP with strong gains in Rust and Haskell. This is Microsoft claiming full-stack ownership of its most-used developer product after three years of OpenAI dependency.

#3Microsoft Unveils MAI-Thinking-1, Its First In-House Reasoning Model

Also at Build, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman introduced MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft's first frontier reasoning model, in private preview via Azure AI Foundry. The model targets high efficiency at low token cost and marks Microsoft's intent to compete at the frontier model layer — not just resell OpenAI output.

#5Google Gemini 3.5 Flash Is Now Generally Available

Gemini 3.5 Flash went GA today at four times the speed of comparable models, priced at $1.50 per million input tokens with a one-million token context window. It scores 76.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, beating Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agent tasks, and becomes the default model in the Gemini app and Google AI Search Mode.

#7Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic's Pre-Training Team

OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI lead Andrej Karpathy announced he is joining Anthropic to work on pre-training under Nick Joseph, helping build a new research team that uses Claude to accelerate the work. He posted that "the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative." The hire lands days before Anthropic's IPO filing.

#8OpenAI Models Including Codex Now Available on AWS

OpenAI's frontier models and Codex are now accessible directly through AWS infrastructure, a meaningful multi-cloud move that challenges the perception of OpenAI as an Azure-exclusive partner. Enterprise teams already running on AWS can now deploy OpenAI models without routing through Microsoft's cloud.

#9DeepSeek Makes Its 75% V4-Pro Price Cut Permanent

DeepSeek's promotional 75% price reduction on V4-Pro is now the permanent list price at roughly $0.87 per million output tokens. V4-Pro scores 80.6 on SWE-bench Verified versus Claude Opus 4.7's 80.8 — near-identical performance at a fraction of the cost — and DeepSeek says the cuts stem from genuine architectural efficiency, not subsidization.

#10Build 2026: Azure Agent Mesh and Windows Agent Framework 1.0 Released

Microsoft rounded out Build with Azure Agent Mesh for federated multi-agent execution across clouds and devices, and released Windows Agent Framework 1.0 under the MIT license. Satya Nadella framed the shift as AI moving from synchronous assistant to async coworker running long-horizon tasks. GitHub Copilot Workspace also went GA for enterprise.

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