Microsoft AI Updates: April 8, 2026

1. Microsoft Bing Open-Sources Harrier: 27B Embedding Model Topping Multilingual MTEB v2

Microsoft. Microsoft’s Bing team released Harrier, an open-source embedding model that tops the multilingual MTEB v2 benchmark and outperforms proprietary competitors from OpenAI and Amazon across more than 100 languages. The 27B flagship variant achieves a 78% zero-shot score on Borda ranking; a 0.6B and a 270M lightweight version are also available on Hugging Face under MIT license. Harrier was trained on over two billion examples supplemented with GPT-5-generated synthetic data and features a 32,000-token context window. Microsoft plans to integrate the technology into Bing and new grounding services for AI agents, positioning it as critical infrastructure as agents take on more complex, multi-step retrieval tasks. Source