Microsoft takes on AI rivals with three new foundational models

Microsoft takes on AI rivals with three new foundational models

Microsoft AI, the tech big’s research lab, announced the release of three foundational AI models on Thursday that can generate textual content, voice, and pictures.

The release indicators Microsoft’s continued push to build out its personal stack of multimodal AI models — and compete with rival AI labs — even though it stays tied to OpenAI.

MAI-Transcribe-1 transcribes speech across 25 different languages into textual content and is 2.5 occasions quicker than Microsoft’s Azure Fast providing, according to a company press release. MAI-Voice-1 is an audio-generating mannequin. This voice mannequin permits customers to generate 60 seconds of audio in a single second and permits customers to create a customized voice. MAI-Image-2 is a video-generating mannequin.

MAI-Image-2 was initially launched on MAI Playground, a new large language mannequin testing software, on March 19. Now, all three models are being launched on Microsoft Foundry and the transcription and voice models can be found in MAI Playground as nicely.

The models had been developed by Microsoft’s MAI Superintelligence team, an AI research team led by Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, that was shaped and announced in November 2025.

“At Microsoft AI, we’re building Humanist AI. We have a distinct view when creating our AI models — putting humans at the center, optimizing for how people actually communicate, training for practical use,” Suleyman wrote in the weblog submit. “You’ll see more models from us soon in Foundry and directly in Microsoft products and experiences.”

In an more and more crowded LLM market, MAI hopes a promoting point for these models is that they’re cheaper than those from Google and OpenAI, the company wrote in the weblog submit.

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MAI-Transcribe-1 begins at $0.36 per hour. MAI-Voice-1 begins at $22 per 1 million characters, and MAI-Image-2 begins at $5 for 1 million tokens for textual content enter and $33 for 1 million tokens for picture output.

Despite releasing its personal models, Suleyman reaffirmed Microsoft’s dedication to its partnership with OpenAI in an interview with VentureBeat — although a current renegotiation of that partnership allowed Microsoft to really pursue this superintelligence research, Suleyman told The Verge.

Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion into the AI research lab and hosts its models in its varied merchandise by way of a multi-year partnership. Microsoft takes the same stance with chips; it each produces its personal and buys from exterior gamers as nicely.

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