Report: Microsoft Working on ‘Far Larger’ In-House AI Model

Microsoft is reportedly working on a new, in-house artificial intelligence (AI) model that is “far larger” than the other open source models it has trained.

The new model, MAI-1, is expected to have about 500 billion parameters, Seeking Alpha reported Monday (May 6), citing a paywalled article by The Information.

It aims to compete with models created by Google, OpenAI (in which Microsoft is an investor), Anthropic and others, according to the report.

Reached by PYMNTS, a Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

In a Monday post on LinkedIn, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott wrote that OpenAI uses supercomputers built by Microsoft to train AI models, which both companies then make available in products and services, and that Microsoft Research and the company’s product groups also build AI models. 

“AI models are used in almost every one of our products, services and operating processes at Microsoft, and the teams making and operating things on occasion need to do their own custom work, whether that’s training a model from scratch, or fine tuning a model that someone else has built,” Scott wrote in the post. “There will be more of this in the future too. Some of these models have names like Turing, and MAI.”

The team working on MAI-1 is led by Mustafa Suleyman, who joined Microsoft in March after founding DeepMind — which was acquired by Google — and serving as CEO of Inflection AI, the Seeking Alpha report said.

Microsoft hired most of Inflection AI’s staff and paid $650 million for rights to its intellectual property in March, per the report.

The tech giant could reveal a preview of MAI-1 at its May 21-23 Microsoft Build developer conference, according to the report.

It was reported in March that Microsoft’s hiring of Suleyman and most of the staff of Inflection AI, and the naming of Suleyman to head the company’s consumer AI unit, marked the first time all of Microsoft’s consumer AI business was under a single leader. 

“We want to make sure that this next wave is one that for the consumer Microsoft can really, really create incredible products,” Suleyman told Bloomberg at the time.