Microsoft is reportedly working on a new AI model called MAI-1 that aims to compete with existing offerings from Google and Anthropic, as well as rival OpenAI, in which the company has made a substantial investment. The Information first reported on this development, indicating that MAI-1 may also challenge OpenAI’s dominance in the field. However, Microsoft declined to comment on these reports.
Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott recently mentioned in a blog post their plans to continue building large supercomputers for OpenAI, which utilizes these machines to train cutting-edge models that are then made available in products and services for wider use. The collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI is seen as mutually beneficial and poised to have a long-lasting impact. The oversight of MAI-1 is entrusted to Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of Google DeepMind and former CEO of AI start-up Inflection, who joined Microsoft along with his team in March.
According to sources, MAI-1 is distinct from the models previously released by Inflection, for which Microsoft acquired the intellectual property for $65 million. This new model is expected to be significantly larger than Microsoft’s previous open-source models, requiring more data and computing power, and therefore, a higher cost. MAI-1 is anticipated to have approximately 500 billion parameters, less than OpenAI’s GPT-4 which has over 1 trillion, but larger than smaller models from other companies. Microsoft’s Phi-3 mini model, unveiled recently, has 3.8 billion parameters.
