Kiwi in London. Work at @microsoft with startups but opinions are my own. Fan of @F1, food, travel, rugby. #ActuallyAutistic.

Twickenham, London
Joined March 2009
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
We're launching the most accurate real time transcription model in the world... #1 !!! 55% faster and 60% cheaper than ElevenLabs. Come build agents on our platform!
Microsoft AI has released MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, taking the #1 spot for Final Transcript accuracy and First Partial Transcript accuracy on AA-WER Streaming with 2.5% WER at 0.13s after end of speech MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming is @MicrosoftAI's new streaming Speech to Text model, joining the non-streaming MAI-Transcribe-2. It leads streaming Final Transcript WER at 2.5%, ahead of the previous #1, SpaceXAI's Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 at 2.7%, and returns that transcript in 0.13s rather than 0.49s. It is available for streaming transcription at $0.54 per hour of audio, at the higher end of pricing among the leading streaming models. Key takeaways ➤ Final Transcript: MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming achieves 2.5% WER at 0.13s after end of speech, ranking #1 of 38 models. It is more accurate and faster than Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 at 2.7% and 0.49s, Muse Voice Transcribe at 3.1% and 0.16s, and ElevenLabs Scribe v2 Realtime at 3.6% and 0.14s. It is also more accurate, though slightly slower, than Cartesia Ink Preview (external endpoints) at 3.1% and 0.11s ➤ First Partial Transcript: The model achieves 2.5% WER at 0.12s, ahead of Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 at 3.4% and 0.49s, and ahead of Muse Voice Transcribe and ElevenLabs Scribe v2 Realtime on accuracy, both at 3.6%, and slightly faster than both at 0.12s versus 0.13s. It is more accurate but slower than Cartesia Ink-2 (external endpoints) at 4.0% and 0.07s ➤ Price: MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming costs $0.54 per hour for streaming, or $9.00 per 1,000 minutes. This puts it level with Gemini 3.5 Transcribe Live at $9, above the $6.50 charged for ElevenLabs Scribe v2 Realtime and Deepgram Flux, more than twice Cartesia Ink-2 at $4, and three times Muse Voice Transcribe at $3. Non-streaming transcription costs $0.10 per hour, or $1.67 per 1,000 minutes Congrats to the @MicrosoftAI team on the launch! See more details below
103
140
13
1,752
950,770
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
You can now deploy apps on the Copilot Managed Runtime from Lovable, too. As a longtime Lovable user who works in a highly controlled IT environment, this makes it much easier to safely connect to M365 services and share just like a document. It's been great to partner with the @Lovable crew on this one as we build out the Managed Runtime. More on the Lovable blog here: lovable.dev/blog/microsoft-p… And if you missed the Managed Runtime details, check out: microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/…
7
26
4
128
57,664
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
Delivery day at our Microsoft DCs as the first production Vera Rubins arrive. A huge thank you to our partners at @nvidia and our Azure hardware and datacenter teams for all the incredible work that brought us to this milestone!
386
697
231
8,157
1,599,345
The model you choose for an #MVP can shape cost, latency, flexibility, and future model choice. 🧩 With @FireworksAI_HQ on #MicrosoftFoundry, startups can serve open models in Azure and scale toward production with monitoring, caching, governance, and model experimentation. ➡️ msft.it/6017aE6Ix #MicrosoftForStartups #GenerativeAI #Developers
1
4
1
10
5,909
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
The Java Story documentary is out! It’s so good to see all these people again, even if we weren’t in the same room at the time. youtube.com/watch?v=ZqGSg4b_…
1
3
6
1,172
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
Organisations using Fortinet services are urged to investigate whether they have been affected by global targeting of firewalls and VPN gateways and should follow mitigation advice to help defend against the threat. For more information ⬇️ ncsc.gov.uk/news/advice-foll…
7
53
7
116
21,942
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
New Azure milestone. The fastest time to train yet at the largest reported scale for this leading AI training benchmark. A great example of what is possible when we bring together full-stack innovation across silicon, systems, networking, and software, along with our deep partnership with @nvidia, to advance the frontier of AI infra. techcommunity.microsoft.com/…
185
142
20
1,034
233,427
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
WSL now has built in Linux container support with both a CLI and an API, announced today and coming soon by the end of the month! You can read more about it here (While our official docs are building :) ) github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL…
22
118
6
537
42,676
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
Today, GPT-5 launches across our platforms, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Azure AI Foundry. It's the most capable model yet from our partners at OpenAI, bringing powerful new advances in reasoning, coding, and chat, all trained on Azure. It’s hard to believe it’s only been two and a half years since @sama joined us in Redmond to show the world GPT-4 for the first time in Bing, and it’s incredible to see how far we’ve come since that moment. The pace of progress is only accelerating, and I can’t wait to see what developers, enterprises, and consumers will do with this latest breakthrough. news.microsoft.com/source/fe…
455
675
116
4,658
692,808
What do @bria_ai_ , Nimble, and @moderneinc have in common? 🚀 They’re part of the Pegasus Program—and they’re bringing serious innovation to #MicrosoftBuild. Heena Purohit highlights all 12 startups we're bringing to #MSBuild and the sessions founders must attend. 📖 Read the full article: linkedin.com/pulse/join-micr… #AIStartups #MicrosoftForStartups #PegasusProgram
4
8
1,682
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
We are entering a new era in business where agents will not only act independently but also work together as a team. To bring this vision to life, open protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) are essential for agent interoperability. I am excited to announce that Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry will support A2A, building on the MCP support we announced earlier this spring. We have also joined the A2A working group on GitHub to help shape the spec and tooling. This is a significant step forward and I can’t wait to see how it will transform the way we work. Find out more here: microsoft.com/en-us/microsof…
19
65
10
283
258,818
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
1/ Big day for Microsoft 365 Copilot: I’m really excited about our latest update. Copilot has truly become the UI for AI – and for me, it’s the scaffolding for my workday. Here are four new features I’ve especially been enjoying.
402
1,188
151
11,785
2,853,659
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
Major upgrades for Azure AI Foundry today: GPT-4.5 is now in preview, demonstrating a big step forward in both pre-training and post-training scale. Plus, new models from Cohere, Stability, and Microsoft. As AI becomes core to building every product, we’re also rolling out new capabilities for distillation, fine-tuning and network isolation for our agent service. The app server for AI is here!
162
208
21
1,215
121,286
I'll be there - totally recommend it
CTOs, let’s talk tech over breakfast!☕ Join us for an exclusive CTO Roundtable Breakfast & Networking, hosted by Microsoft for Startups. Connect with startup tech leaders, explore industry trends, and engage with Microsoft CTOs in residence. 📍 London | 📆 March 7 | Register now! → msft.it/6013U412D
2
75
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
Imagine you had to build every part of your software from scratch. Need a database connection? Implement the wire protocol, error handling, and query parsing yourself. Need an HTTP request? Write the entire HTTP protocol. Stupid, right? It’s not just about convenience. The reason we don’t do this is leverage. The operating system abstracts file I/O and networking. Libraries abstract HTTP and databases. Each layer lets us focus on what we want to build instead of how everything below it works. That’s why AI code generation works now. Not because LLMs are brilliant, but because they have so much to delegate to. They’re not inventing logic; they’re assembling pieces from a vast ecosystem of existing, hardened, reusable code. So if we want AI-generated code to be stronger, the answer isn’t just better models—it’s better stuff to delegate to. Stronger libraries. Better frameworks. More explicit, composable, testable pieces. Maybe the next step isn’t just AI that generates better code. Maybe it’s AI helping us build small better things to generate to.
8
4
2
48
4,530
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
🚀 Phi-4 is here! A small language model that performs as well as (and often better than) large models on certain types of complex reasoning tasks such as math. Useful for us in @MSFTResearch, and available now for all researcher on the Azure AI Foundry! aka.ms/phi4blog
40
172
29
723
194,476
Dr Ian McDonald retweeted
I'm very interested in talking to teams looking to solve OSS supply chain issues. The field is currently such a mess, it seems like there is a ton of low hanging fruit.
Sadly crypto tech should be able to help solve this problem. OSS supply chain is a disaster
6
6
1
17
5,793