Quote · This Week in Tech (Audio)
TWiT 1087: Evil is the Root of All Money - Could Local AI Laptops Compete With Data Center Giants?
Where this was said
Microsoft Build 2026: RTX Spark Laptops, Project Solara & AI Agents
At 39:41 · chapter starts 34:30
The panel pivots from Computex to Microsoft Build, where announcements came in rapid succession. The Surface PC with NVIDIA's RTX Spark chip will enable local AI at a premium price — nobody said how much, but given the hardware specs, the panel expects it to be significant. Joey de Villa has been running a 32B Qwen model locally on his M5 MacBook and finds it genuinely good for coding and general tasks, though not at Opus 4 quality. Microsoft also unveiled Project Solara — a conceptual ambient AI in a card, a badge, and an Echo-like device — presented in a distinctly eerie video where all human faces are in shadow. Fr. Robert quips that it's a Plato's Cave advertisement: the humans are irrelevant, only the shadows matter. Microsoft also announced seven new AI models, the Scout conversational agent, and the Majorana 2 quantum chip. The Plato's Cave tangent produces one of the episode's warmest philosophical detours [1] "Joey de Villa runs a 32B Qwen model locally on an M5 MacBook and finds it genuinely useful for coding and general tasks. But Leo argues tha…" 48:20 .
