New exclusive interview: Microsoft Research's Ahmed Awadallah on Fara1.5, MagenticBrain, and the case for small, on-device agents that go toe to toe with the giants

For two years the agent story has been one thing: scale. Bigger models, longer context, more compute.

This week Ahmed Awadallah (Partner Research Manager, Microsoft Research AI Frontiers) told us about a stack that runs the other way.

A 9B computer-use model that nearly doubles its predecessor on web navigation. A 27B sibling that goes toe to toe with Operator and Gemini 2.5 Computer Use.

We talked about what you trade away when you build for small models, when an agent should stop and ask before it acts, and how close we really are to agents that run on your own laptop.

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