CIOInsider India Magazine
Microsoft Unveils Two New AI Models, Intensifying Rivalry With OpenAI
Microsoft declared its initial own AI models as the MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1 preview. It is worth noting that Microsoft has been heavily dependent on OpenAI GPT models to drive the AI experience in Copilot but as the tech giant ventures into its own AI models, it finds itself competing with the ChatGPT maker and a host of other AI firms.
MAI-Voice-1 is an automated speech generator model that the company states can produce a minute of audio in less than a second and with just a single graphics card, which the company states make it one of the most effective speech models in the market.
Meanwhile, MAI-1-preview is a first foundation model from Microsoft and is now available for public tests on LMArena, crowdsourced benchmarking platform for large language models. MAI-1-preview currently ranks in the 13th position in the LMArena leaderboard, way below the likes of GPT-5, Gemini-2.5 Pro and even DeepSeek R-1 and Grok-3.
MAI-1-preview has been pre-trained and post-trained by Microsoft on 15,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which is a bargain compared to the over 100,000 employed by rivals like Grok for training its models.
In an interaction with Semafor, Microsoft AI Chief Mustafa Suleyman said that the company took some learnings fro the open-source community in order to stretch the capabilities of its model with minimal resources.
“Increasingly, the art and craft of training models is selecting the perfect data and not wasting any of your flops on unnecessary tokens that didn’t actually teach your model very much.” Suleyman said.
Suleyman also said that Microsoft AI is already working on the next version of its AI models and is working on the largest data centers in the world equipped with Nvidia's latest GB-200s chips.
“We have big ambitions for where we go next. Not only will we pursue further advances here, but we believe that orchestrating a range of specialized models serving different user intents and use cases will unlock immense value. There will be a lot more to come from this team on both fronts in the near future” Microsoft wrote in a blogpost.
