Microsoft’s agent platform play

Jay Parikh in 2018. | Photo: Andrej Sokolow / Getty Images

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

To understand how Microsoft sees its role in the AI race, look at what was announced at the company's GitHub Universe developer conference on Tuesday in San Francisco.

The event marked a turning point for one of Microsoft's most important but often under-analyzed assets. GitHub...