Microsoft's MAI Models to Compete with OpenAI
Microsoft is reportedly working on its own artificial intelligence (AI) models for reasoning, placing itself as a competitor with OpenAI. The tech giant, is exploring in-house models as potential replacements for OpenAI’s technology in its products, according to a report by The Information.
Microsoft's efforts to diversify AI technology
The Redmond-based company has started testing AI models from external sources like xAI, Meta, and DeepSeek for integration into its Copilot product. Microsoft has been moving aggressively to limit its dependency on OpenAI technology, despite the partnership with OpenAI, which established the company as a leader in the AI race among major tech players.
As of December, reported by Reuters, Microsoft has been combining both its own and third-party AI models to make the underlying technology more diverse for its Microsoft 365 Copilot product. This shift aims at lowering costs and exploring alternative models to OpenAI's GPT-4, which currently powers the AI functionality of Copilot.
The Rise of Microsoft's MAI Models
According to The Information, Microsoft's AI division, led by Mustafa Suleyman, has trained a new family of models called MAI, which reportedly perform similarly to OpenAI's and Anthropic's models on standard benchmarks. These models will address tasks of reasoning and solve hard problems by employing chain-of-thought methods, where there are intermediate steps of reasoning to reach an answer.
The MAI models will compete directly with OpenAI’s capabilities, particularly in providing reasoning solutions for advanced AI tasks.
Plans to Offer MAI Models to Developers
Microsoft's AI team, under Suleyman's leadership, has already begun experimenting with replacing OpenAI’s models in Microsoft 365 Copilot with the new MAI models. The company is also said to be thinking of releasing the MAI models as an application programming interface (API) in the later part of this year. This will enable outside developers to embed the models into their own applications, further spreading Microsoft's presence in the AI marketplace.
