Microsoft is training a new, in-house AI model named MAI-1 to compete with state-of-the-art models from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. The development of MAI-1 is overseen by Mustafa Suleyman, the ex-Google AI leader who previously served as CEO of Inflection before Microsoft hired him and paid $650 million for the rights to its intellectual property in March. Microsoft's new model, MAI-1, will be far larger than any of its previous models and is expected to have around 500 billion parameters. This makes it more expensive and requiring more computing power and training data compared to smaller open source models like those released by Meta Platforms and Mistral. MAI-1 is separate from the models that Inflection previously released, according to two Microsoft employees with knowledge of the effort.
