Microsoft launches MAI Code1.1Flash as GitHub Copilot adds local-cloud hybrid inference
At its October 7 Windows and Surface event, Microsoft said GitHub Copilot will gain support for local AI models by the end of this month, letting developers switch between cloud and on-device models or have the system schedule them automatically. The accompanying MAI Code1.1Flash is a mixture-of-experts model that Microsoft says has 137 billion total parameters and 6.8 billion active parameters, using quantization and speculative decoding to cut memory use and speed up on-device coding responses; it debuts on the new Surface Laptop Ultra with NVIDIA RTX Spark hardware. Users can pick inference modes through the GitHub Copilot CLI, the Copilot app and VS Code, or call local models via a Windows ML provider or an OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, with code isolation handled by Microsoft's Execution Container (MXC).
It moves AI coding assistants from cloud-only toward a hybrid cloud-plus-device architecture, offering an easier path to private, low-latency development — though the performance and security benefits are so far vendor claims.