Microsoft Unveils In-House AI Models, Signaling Potential Shift from OpenAI Dependency

With new in-house models, Microsoft lays the groundwork for independence from OpenAI

Microsoft has introduced AI models that it trained internally and says it will begin using them in some products. This announcement may represent an effort to move away from dependence on OpenAI, despite Microsoft's substantial investment in that company. It comes more than a year after insider reports revealed that Microsoft was beginning work on its own foundational models. A post on the Microsoft AI blog describes two models. MAI-Voice-1 is a natural speech-generation model meant to deliver "high-fidelity, expressive audio across both single and multi-speaker scenarios." The idea is that voice will be one of the main ways users interact with AI tools in the future, though we haven't really seen that come to fruition so far. The second model is called MAI-1-preview, and it's a foundational large language model specifically trained to drive Copilot, Microsoft's AI chatbot tool. It was trained on around 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, and runs inference on a single GPU. As reported last year, this model is significantly larger than the models seen in Microsoft's earlier experiments, which focused on smaller models meant to run locally, like Phi-3. To date, Copilot has primarily depended on OpenAI's models. Microsoft has invested enormous amounts of money in OpenAI, and it's unlikely the two companies will fully divorce any time soon. That said, there have been some tensions in recent months when their incentives or objectives have strayed out of alignment. Since it's hard to predict where this is all going, it's likely to Microsoft's longterm advantage to develop its own models. It's also possible Microsoft has introduced these models to address use cases or queries that OpenAI isn't focused on. We're seeing a gradual shift in the AI landscape toward models that are more specialized for certain tasks, rather than general, all-purpose models that are meant to be all things to all people. These new models follow that somewhat, as Microsoft AI lead Mustafa Suleyman said in a podcast with The Verge that the goal here is "to create something that works extremely well for the consumer... my focus is on building models that really work for the consumer companion." As such, it makes sense that we're going to see these models rolling out in Copilot, which is Microsoft's consumer-oriented AI chat bot product. Of MAI-1-preview, the Microsoft AI blog post specifies, "this model is designed to provide powerful capabilities to consumers seeking to benefit from models that specialize in following instructions and providing helpful responses to everyday queries." So yes, MAI-1-preview has a target audience in mind, but it's still a general-purpose model since Copilot is a general-purpose tool. MAI-Voice-1 is already being used in Microsoft's Copilot Daily and Podcasts features. There's also a Copilot Labs interface that you can visit right now to play around with it, giving it prompts or scripts and customizing what kind of voice or delivery you want to hear. MA1-1-preview is in public testing on LMArena and will be rolled out to "certain text use cases within Copilot over the coming weeks."

Microsoft launches its first in-house AI models

Microsoft announced its first homegrown AI models on Thursday: MAI-Voice-1 AI and MAI-1-preview. The company says its new MAI-Voice-1 speech model can generate a minute's worth of audio in under one second on just one GPU, while MAI-1-preview "offers a glimpse of future offerings inside Copilot." Microsoft already uses MA1-Voice-1 to power a couple of its features, including Copilot Daily, which has an AI host recite the day's top news stories, and to generate podcast-style discussions to help explain topics. You can try MA1-Voice-1 out for yourself on Copilot Labs, where you can enter what you want the AI model to say, as well as change its voice and style of speaking. In addition to this model, Microsoft introduced MAI-1-preview, which it says it trained on around 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. It's built for users in need of an AI model capable of following instructions and "providing helpful responses to everyday queries." Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said during an episode of Decoder last year that the company's internal AI models aren't focused on enterprise use cases. "My logic is that we have to create something that works extremely well for the consumer and really optimize for our use case," Suleyman said. "So, we have vast amounts of very predictive and very useful data on the ad side, on consumer telemetry, and so on. My focus is on building models that really work for the consumer companion." The company plans on rolling out MAI-1-preview for certain text use cases in its Copilot AI assistant, which currently relies on OpenAI's large language models. It has also started publicly testing its MAI-1-preview model on the AI benchmarking platform LMArena. "We have big ambitions for where we go next," Microsoft writes in the blog post. "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."

Microsoft Introduces 2 In-House AI Models Amid Rising Competition

Don't miss out on our latest stories. Add PCMag as a preferred source on Google. Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI and built Copilot using its AI models. However, with the AI race intensifying, Microsoft appears eager to differentiate itself. The software giant just announced two homegrown AI models, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview, where "MAI" stands for Microsoft AI. MAI-Voice-1 is a text-to-audio generator that can create an audio clip in under a second on a single GPU, Microsoft says. The company has already been using the model to power Copilot Daily, which offers an audio briefing of news, weather, and daily tips, and Copilot Podcasts, which can generate an audio interaction between two AI participants. You can test MAI-Voice-1 in Copilot Labs right now. We gave it a shot, and although the audio clip wasn't generated in under a second like Microsoft claims, it was appreciably fast. We got the output in about 3-4 seconds. While entering the text prompt, you also get to choose the mood of your clip. The Emotive mood lets you choose from an expansive list of voices and styles, while the Story mood provides a typical book-reading-like narration. The MAI-1-preview, on the other hand, is Microsoft's first model trained completely in-house. It's built using multiple LLMs and was pre- and post-trained on around 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. "This model is designed to provide powerful capabilities to consumers seeking to benefit from models that specialize in following instructions and providing helpful responses to everyday queries," Microsoft says. MAI-1-preview is currently available for tests on LMArena, a crowdsourced AI benchmarking platform. It will be available for certain text-based use cases on Copilot soon, Microsoft says. The MAI team has been working on both models since last year. It says the objective is to create "applied AI as a platform for category-defining and deeply trusted products that understand each of our unique needs." Is that just a more complex way to describe agentic AI? We'll find out soon. Meanwhile, in the tech space, you rarely see an announcement post turn into a job ad. But such has been the competition to hire AI talent in the recent weeks that Microsoft had to seize the opportunity and invite more people to join its MAI team.

Microsoft unveils home-made ML models amid OpenAI talks

Microsoft AI honcho insists partnership with Sam Altman's brainbox behemoth is alive and well Microsoft has introduced two home-grown machine learning models, potentially complicating negotiations with its current favored model supplier, OpenAI. On Thursday, Microsoft AI (MAI) debuted MAI-Voice-1, which generates realistic sounding speech from text, and MAI-1-preview, a model it's testing as the future basis of the company's Copilot service. In a Semafor video interview, MAI CEO Mustafa Suleyman explained Microsoft needs its own foundation models is because AI is fundamental to the company's business. "We have to be able to have the in-house expertise to create the strongest models in the world," he said. At the same time, Suleyman insisted Microsoft's collaboration with OpenAI has been successful so far, and expressed hope it will continue. If Redmond can create the strongest models in the world, it's unclear why it would continue paying OpenAI for less capable technology unless it's contractually obliged to do so. Microsoft has already invested around $13 billion in OpenAI and the two firms are reportedly trying to renegotiate their contract, set to expire in 2030, so that OpenAI can restructure for a future public offering. Separately, OpenAI is said to be discussing the potential sale of shares owned by employees to investors in a deal that would see the unprofitable firm valued at $500 billion. Last year, Microsoft opted not to release its VALL-E 2 speech synthesis project to the public because of potential abuses "such as spoofing voice identification or impersonating a specific speaker." OpenAI took similar steps, limiting access to its Voice Engine for speech synthesis. And when Consumer Reports looked at voice cloning services, it found most firms didn't do enough to prevent unauthorized impersonation. Yet MAI-Voice-1 has arrived in Copilot Labs with only a minimalist warning: "Copilot may make mistakes." It also powers Copilot Daily, an online AI-voiced summary of news and historic events, and Copilot Podcasts. "MAI-Voice-1 is a lightning-fast speech generation model, with an ability to generate a full minute of audio in under a second on a single GPU, making it one of the most efficient speech systems available today," said MAI in an online post. Microsoft let model evaluation platform LMArena test MAI-1, but it isn't available the public. Would-be testers in the US can apply for access. LMArena currently ranks Microsoft's model the equal thirteenth most effective in terms of output quality, behind grok-3-preview-02-24 and ahead of gemini-2.5-flash. "MAI-1-preview is an in-house mixture-of-experts model, pre-trained and post-trained on ~15,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs," MAI said. "This model is designed to provide powerful capabilities to consumers seeking to benefit from models that specialize in following instructions and providing helpful responses to everyday queries." That's significantly fewer GPUs than the 100,000 Nvidia H100s powering xAI's Colossus supercomputer cluster. And it's comparable with Meta's Llama-3.1 model, which required over 16,000 Nvidia H100s. Microsoft, which says its GB200 cluster is now operational, expects to expose MAI-1-preview for specific Copilot scenarios in the coming weeks, so it can gather data about the model's performance.

Microsoft introduces a pair of in-house AI models

Microsoft is expanding its AI footprint with the of two new models that its teams trained completely in-house. MAI-Voice-1 is the tech major's first natural speech generation model, while MAI-1-preview is text-based and is the company's first foundation model trained end-to-end. MAI-Voice-1 is currently being used in the Copilot Daily and Podcast features. Microsoft has made MAI-1-preview available for public tests on LMArena, and will begin previewing it in select Copilot situations in the coming weeks. In an interview with , Microsoft AI division leader Mustafa Suleyman said the pair of models was developed with a focus on efficiency and cost-effectiveness. MAI-Voice-1 runs on a single GPU and MAI-1-preview was trained on about 15,000 Nvidia H-100 GPUs. For context, other models, such as xAI's Grok, took more than 100,000 of those chips for training. "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. Although it is being used to test the in-house models, Microsoft Copilot is primarily built on OpenAI's GPT tech. The decision to build its own models, despite having sunk in the newer AI company, indicates that Microsoft wants to be an independent competitor in this space. While that could take time to reach parity with the companies that have emerged as forerunners in AI development, Suleyman told Semafor that Microsoft has "an enormous five-year roadmap that we're investing in quarter after quarter." With some concerns arising that AI could be facing a bubble-pop, Microsoft's timeline will need to be aggressive to ensure taking the independent path is worthwhile.

Microsoft starts testing AI model that could escalate competition with OpenAI

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, speaks at an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the company at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on April 4, 2025. Microsoft has largely relied on OpenAI's artificial intelligence models to power AI features in its key products. It's trying to lessen that dependence. The software company said Thursday that it's begun publicly testing a homegrown AI model that could lead to enhancements to its Copilot assistant for consumers. The MAI-1-preview model is being tested on LMArena, a website where people can conduct evaluations. "We will be rolling MAI-1-preview out for certain text use cases within Copilot over the coming weeks to learn and improve from user feedback," Microsoft said in a blog post. The company has published a form where developers can request early access. Meanwhile, Microsoft remains a key backer of OpenAI and strategic partner to the AI startup that's now valued at about $500 billion. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI, which in turn relies on cloud infrastructure from Microsoft to run its models. Microsoft draws on models from OpenAI to power features in Bing, the Windows 11 operating system and other products. On LMArena, Microsoft's new model was ranked 13th for text workloads on Thursday, below models from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Mistral, OpenAI and xAI. Microsoft said in its blog post that the model was refined with help from around 15,000 of Nvidia's H100 graphics processing units, and it also has a working cluster of Nvidia GB200 chips. "We have big ambitions for where we go next -- model advancements, an exciting roadmap of compute, and the chance to reach billions of people through Microsoft's products," said Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft's AI unit, in a post on X. Microsoft has previously developed small open-source language models under the name Phi. MAI-1-preview represents "our first foundation model trained end to end in house," Suleyman wrote on X. Suleyman used to compete with OpenAI at startup Inflection. Last year, Microsoft hired him and many of his Inflection colleagues. Before that, Suleyman was a co-founder of DeepMind, an AI research startup that Google bought in 2014. Suleyman's group inside Microsoft has been expanding, with about two dozen people coming from Google's DeepMind AI lab in recent months.

Microsoft is making its own AI models to compete with OpenAI. Meet MAI

Microsoft has largely relied on OpenAI's models to power its AI products, but now it's working on its own in-house models. On Thursday, Microsoft launched a speech generation model called MAI-Voice-1, and started public testing for a foundation model called MAI-1-preview. The company said MAI-Voice-1 can generate a minute of audio in under a second on a single GPU, highlighting its efficiency. MAI-Voice-1 is already powering Microsoft's Copilot Daily and Podcast features which provide AI-generated audio news recaps and personalized podcast-style content, much like Google's NotebookLM. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. MAI-1-preview is currently restricted to LMArena, where users can try it out in head-to-head comparisons against other models and to trusted testers through the API. Microsoft says it will begin rolling out MAI-1-preview for "certain text use cases" in its Copilot chatbot for early user feedback. Microsoft and OpenAI have both benefited from their close partnership. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI and provided critical cloud infrastructure to support OpenAI's models. In return, Microsoft has benefited from access to OpenAI's leading AI models, elevating its status to a global powerhouse in AI tools for businesses. But OpenAI has surged in influence and now offers subscription-based products for consumers with ChatGPT, developers with its API, and businesses with ChatGPT Enterprise. Despite Microsoft and OpenAI's official status as partners, the two companies have become competitors, creating an awkward and potentially untenable situation. Recent reports describe an increasingly tense relationship between the two companies, especially as OpenAI seeks to convert its corporate status from a capped nonprofit to a for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC). This transition hinges on Microsoft's blessing as one of OpenAI's major investors. A specific clause in their contract that says their contract would end if/when OpenAI achieves AGI (artificial general intelligence). Microsoft is reportedly playing its card as an investor to try and renegotiate that clause for extended access to OpenAI's models. Meanwhile, it looks like Microsoft is trying to shift away its reliance on OpenAI by developing its own models. Microsoft didn't respond to request for comment by the time of publication, but Mashable will update this story with a response.

Microsoft Launches MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-Preview, Two In-House AI Models | AIM

Microsoft confirmed that trusted testers can apply for API access to the model. Microsoft AI has released its first in-house speech generation model, MAI-Voice-1, and begun public testing of its large language model MAI-1-preview, marking a step in the company's push to develop purpose-built AI systems. MAI-Voice-1 is already available in Copilot Daily and Podcasts, and is now accessible through Copilot Labs. According to Microsoft, the model can generate "a full minute of audio in under a second on a single GPU." Microsoft says it is designed to enable expressive, multi-speaker audio for interactive use cases such as storytelling and guided meditations. Alongside its speech model, MAI has started testing MAI-1-preview, an in-house mixture-of-experts model trained on about 15,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. The model is currently available for evaluation on LMArena,

Microsoft launches 2 in-house AI models to rival competitors

The development of its own AI systems could enable Microsoft to compete with the companies that it currently partners with for AI projects, such as OpenAI. Microsoft has announced its entry into the AI space with the development of two in-house artificial intelligence (AI) models. According to the organisation, Microsoft has been focused on building an AI foundation since last year and have developed both a strong team and the relevant infrastructure. Notably, in early January, the software platform announced the establishment of a new AI engineering group, to be led by the former engineering chief of Meta, Jay Parikh. It was noted at the time that Microsoft would turn its attention to creating AI-powered apps and supportive tools. The first of the new models is the MAI-Voice-1, which Microsoft has described as a system that is expressive and capable of generating natural speech. It can be found through Copilot Daily, Podcasts and as a new Copilot Labs experience. It will be the interface for future AI companions and can be used across single and multi-speaker scenarios. The second model, MAI-1-preview, has just entered the public testing phase on LMArena. According to Microsoft it is an end-to-end trained foundational model that will be used within Copilot for text-based use cases, over the coming weeks and months. Microsoft has largely relied on other organisations, when working on projects that demand AI-driven innovation or results, such as OpenAI, however, its latest venture could enable Microsoft to achieve a degree of independence and establish itself as a key player within the artificial intelligence sector. In late April, the company reconfirmed its commitment to the digital expansion of Europe in a number of important areas. Microsoft's vice-chair and president Brad Smith said that despite recent geopolitical tensions and trade volatility, the company would uphold promises to Europe, including support for European cloud and AI infrastructure, data privacy and cybersecurity. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Microsoft trained MAI-1 on 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs

Microsoft has initiated public testing of its MAI-1-preview AI language model. This move signifies Microsoft's intention to decrease its dependence on OpenAI for powering AI features in products like Copilot. The model is currently accessible for evaluation on LMArena, a platform designed for benchmarking AI models. Microsoft has indicated a phased rollout of MAI-1-preview for specific Copilot text functionalities in the coming weeks. This gradual implementation aims to gather user feedback and refine the model's performance. Developers interested in exploring MAI-1-preview can request early access through an online form provided by Microsoft. Initial assessments on LMArena positioned MAI-1-preview in 13th place for text-based tasks. This ranking places it behind models developed by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI. The development of MAI-1-preview involved substantial computational resources. Microsoft stated that the model was trained utilizing approximately 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, alongside a cluster of Nvidia GB200 chips. These resources underscore the scale of investment and infrastructure required for training advanced AI models. The evolution of strategic partnerships into competitive dynamics is evident through the changing relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI. In 2019, Microsoft made an initial investment of $1 billion in OpenAI, solidifying its position as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider via Azure. Over the subsequent five years, Microsoft's total investment in OpenAI has exceeded $13 billion. Concurrently, Microsoft has been developing its own competing AI models, ultimately recognizing OpenAI as a competitor in its annual reports. This transition reflects OpenAI's substantial growth, with a valuation now reaching $500 billion and ChatGPT boasting 700 million weekly users. This growth has transformed OpenAI from a collaborative research partner into a potential competitor to Microsoft's AI ambitions. The altered competitive landscape has resulted in practical adjustments to infrastructure strategies. OpenAI now distributes its cloud infrastructure needs across multiple providers, including CoreWeave, Google, and Oracle. This diversification reduces its exclusive reliance on Microsoft's Azure platform. This pattern of initial collaboration leading to eventual competition is increasingly prevalent within the AI sector, where early partnerships facilitate capability development before companies ultimately compete for market share. Microsoft's strategy for building MAI-1 underscores the importance of talent acquisition in swiftly developing AI capabilities. The company recruited Mustafa Suleyman from Inflection, an AI startup, along with several of his colleagues. Additionally, Microsoft added approximately two dozen researchers from Google's DeepMind in recent months. Suleyman's background includes co-founding DeepMind prior to its acquisition by Google in 2014 and later leading Inflection as a competitor to OpenAI. This experience provides Microsoft with established AI leadership and industry connections. This "acqui-hiring" strategy allows Microsoft to accelerate AI model development by integrating established teams rather than organically developing expertise. Microsoft has stated that MAI-1-preview represents its "first foundation model trained end to end in house," suggesting that despite significant investment in OpenAI, the company recognized the need for independent AI capabilities.

Microsoft Finally Unveils Its First In-House AI Models

General purpose MAI-1-preview AI model is currently under testing Microsoft unveiled the company's first two homegrown artificial intelligence (AI) models on Thursday. The foundation models were developed by the Redmond-based tech giant's AI division, and are said to be built entirely in-house. The first model is MAI-Voice-1, a speech generation model that natively generates expressive and natural sounding voice. The second is the MAI-1-preview, an under-testing general purpose AI model aimed at helping users with everyday queries. Microsoft said that it is focusing on applied AI as a platform to develop new products that can address the unique needs of its user base. Microsoft's In-House AI Models Are Here Since the start of the AI arms race in 2023, Microsoft has been reliant on OpenAI to power its Copilot-based AI products and tools. Over the years, the company has released smaller, fine-tuned models for specific purposes. Before Thursday, it was not a company one would associate with foundation model development. Changing this perception courtesy of its newly bolstered AI division, Microsoft has now detailed two foundation models that it has created entirely from scratch. The company says that MAI-Voice-1 is a speech generation model that can generate "a full minute of audio in under a second on a single GPU." MAI-Voice-1 is not a text-to-speech (TTS) model that can only read out text presented to it. Instead, it can carry out voice conversations with another user, automatically adjusting the intonation, pitch, and cadence based on the context. Microsoft is offering the model's capabilities via its AI daily news feature and an experiment running via Copilot Labs. First up is Copilot Daily, which features an AI host that narrates the top news stories of the day, and discusses them in a podcast-style conversation to help explain the topics. The company also announced the Copilot Labs experiment that lets users provide any text, and it will speak it aloud, using the voice and the style of narration selected by the user. Apart from this, the tech giant is currently testing the MAI-1-preview, which is available via the crowdsourced AI model evaluation platform LMArena. Additionally, Microsoft is also making it available to its trusted testers via application programming interface (API). The mixture-of-experts (MoE) model is pre-trained and post-trained on around 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. The company says the AI model excels in instruction following and generating output for everyday queries. MAI-1-preview is planned to be rolled out for certain text-based use cases within Copilot over the next few weeks.

Microsoft launches own AI models to take on OpenAI, Google - The Economic Times

Tech giant Microsoft has released its first in-house artificial intelligence (AI) models under the Microsoft AI (MAI) team. The two models are: Significance The Satya Nadella-led company will directly compete with the likes of Meta and OpenAI, the latter of which it has invested in since 2019. The MAI initiative was born out of the company's push to create homegrown models and cut its reliance on the ChatGPT maker, especially after its leadership overhaul and senior exits since late 2023. By taking the AI reins in its own hands, Microsoft gains more control over how its technology works and how much it costs. Microsoft has already deployed these models in its Copilot tools, including Copilot Daily and Copilot Labs. The new models are also designed to work better with Microsoft's products such as Windows, Office, and Teams. How do these stand out? Microsoft's models will mainly compete with OpenAI's GPT-4 and GPT-5, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and Meta's LLaMA. Each of these companies has a headstart in building and distributing its AI systems to consumers. Microsoft is counting on its vertical integration with everyday tools and its strong enterprise reputation to race ahead. The company also plans to build more specialised models and continue using a mix of its own, OpenAI's, and open-source models. This comes weeks after OpenAI officially launched GPT-5, terming it their most advanced model yet. The much-anticipated model features major upgrades in reasoning, coding, writing, health, and multimodal capabilities. Feedback from users, however, has been mixed. The model's capabilities were impressive said some, but the rollout itself faced issues. Many users complained about rate limits, touch-mode glitches, and the removal of older models, which the company had to reverse later.

Microsoft Launches Public Testing of First In-House Foundation Model | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The model, dubbed MAI-1-preview, is being tested on LMArena, a platform for community model evaluation, the company said in a Thursday (Aug. 28) blog post. "This represents MAI's first foundation model trained end-to-end and offers a glimpse of future offerings inside Copilot," the company said in the post. "We are actively spinning the flywheel to deliver improved models." MAI-1-preview is designed for use by consumers and specializes in following instructions and answering everyday questions, according to the post. It will be rolled out for some text use cases in Copilot in the coming weeks, per the post. "We will continue to use the very best models from our team, our partners and the latest innovations from the open-source community to power our products," MAI said in the post. "This approach gives us the flexibility to deliver the best outcomes across millions of unique interactions every day." CNBC reported Thursday that Microsoft powers the artificial intelligence features of its Bing search engine, its Windows 11 operating system and other products primarily with AI models from OpenAI -- a company in which Microsoft has invested over $13 billion -- and that the development of an in-house model could signal that it's working to reduce that dependence. Microsoft added OpenAI to a list of competitors in its annual report last year, while OpenAI has added cloud providers beyond Microsoft, including CoreWeave, Google and Oracle, according to the report. MAI also announced in its Thursday blog post that it is releasing a natural speech generation model called MAI-Voice-1, making it available in Copilot Daily and Podcasts and as a Copilot Labs experience. "Voice is the interface of the future for AI companions and MAI-Voice-1 delivers high-fidelity, expressive audio across both single and multi-speaker scenarios," MAI said in the post. This announcement came on the same day that OpenAI released what it calls its "most advanced speech-to-speech model yet." The company also made its application programming interface Realtime API generally available, saying the application programming interface now has features that help developers build voice agents.

Microsoft Launches New Speech AI Model MAI-Voice-1 for Copilot

Microsoft announced the release of the MAI-Voice-1 artificial intelligence (AI) model in a blog post published on the tech giant's website on August 28. Microsoft has made it available as part of its AI companion Copilot and also the tech giant's Podcasts service feature. Notably, Microsoft claims that MAI-Voice-1 is a "highly expressive" natural speech generation AI model. Furthermore, the Satya Nadella-led company has begun public testing of the MAI-1-preview on LMArena, a platform focused on community AI models' evaluation. The tech giant says that the MAI-1-preview represents Microsoft AI's first foundation model that is trained "end-to-end" and offers a glance into future offerings as part of Copilot. Microsoft claims in its blog post that MAI-Voice-1 is a "lightning-fast" speech generation AI model, which can produce one minute of audio in less than one second with the help of a single GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). Meanwhile, the tech giant has apparently developed the MAI-1-preview to provide services to customers who want AI models that specialise in following instructions and returning helpful responses to day-to-day questions and queries. Microsoft has decided to roll out MAI-1-preview for specific text use cases within Copilot over the next few weeks to receive and build on user feedback. "This approach gives us the flexibility to deliver the best outcomes across millions of unique interactions every day," the company's blog post read. Notably, the MAI-1-preview AI model is currently ranked 15th on the LMArena website, which focuses on the evaluation of community AI models. For context, its ranking is well below many other prominent AI models, such as ChatGPT-5, Google's Gemini AI model, xAI's Grok and the DeepSeek AI model. Interestingly, during Microsoft's earnings call for Q3FY25 in April this year, the tech giant's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Amy Hood said that the company was not expecting to keep up with the growing demand for AI. Hood remarked that the demand for Microsoft's AI service was "growing a bit faster", and consequently, the company expected to encounter "some AI capacity constraints". Elsewhere, Nadella, who is Microsoft's Chief Executive Officer (CEO), said that there was a possibility of increased investment in AI capacity building as the tech giant's AI services grew. He also revealed that the tech giant had expanded its Small Language Models (SLMs) with new multimodal and mini models. Notably, these comments came in the wake of Microsoft's continuing investment in building "long-lived assets" and servers. "Roughly half of our cloud and AI-related spend was on long-lived assets that will support monetisation over the next 15 years and beyond," said Hood during the earnings call. "The remaining cloud and AI spend was primarily for servers, both CPUs and GPUs, to serve customers based on demand signals, including our customer contracted backlog of $315 billion," she added. Therefore, the launch of the MAI-Voice-1 model and the public testing of the MAI-1-preview on LMArena seem like interesting developments, as they came after Microsoft claimed that it expected certain AI capacity constraints to show up but continued its investments in long-term assets focused on AI. For now, it seems like AI capacity building is not an issue for the Nadella-led company. However, what Microsoft should focus on in the immediate aftermath of launching new AI models is prioritising consumers' feedback to refine its AI offerings to compete with the bigwigs in the AI domain, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Elon Musk's Grok AI, and China's DeepSeek.

Microsoft AI Launches its Own Models, to Compete with GPT-5

Microsoft announced its first in-house AI models called MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1 Preview. Notably, Microsoft has largely relied on OpenAI's GPT models to power the AI experience on Copilot, but as the tech giant forays into its own AI models, it increasingly stands in competition with the ChatGPT maker, along with a host of other AI companies. MAI-Voice-1 is a natural speech generation model, which the company claims can generate a full minute of audio in under a second and using only a single GPU, which the company says makes it one of the most efficient speech models out there. The new model is now powering the Copilot Daily and Podcast feature, and Microsoft is also launching it in Copilot Labs. Meanwhile, MAI-1 Preview is a foundational model from Microsoft and is now available for public tests on LMArena, a crowdsourced benchmarking platform for large language models (LLMs). 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. Microsoft's AI roadmap: In an interaction with Semafor, Microsoft AI Chief Mustafa Suleyman said that the company took some learnings from the open-source community in order to stretch the capabilities of its model with minimal resources.

Microsoft breaks free from OpenAI reliance, launches two homegrown AI models

MAI-Voice-1 is said to produce a minute of audio in less than a second on a single GPU. Microsoft is stepping up its AI game with the launch of two homegrown models: MAI-Voice-1 AI and MAI-1-preview. These new AI models show the company's ambitions to create its own AI technology instead of relying solely on OpenAI's models. According to Microsoft, the MAI-Voice-1 is a "lightning-fast speech generation model." It is said to produce a minute of audio in less than a second on a single GPU. This model is already powering some of Microsoft's features, including Copilot Daily and Podcasts features. Users can try out MAI-Voice-1 in Copilot and Copilot Labs. "Voice is the interface of the future for AI companions and MAI-Voice-1 delivers high-fidelity, expressive audio across both single and multi-speaker scenarios," the company claims in a blogpost. Also read: Govt's online gaming ban lands in court as Indian firm mounts legal challenge Alongside MAI-Voice-1, Microsoft introduced MAI-1-preview. This AI model was pre-trained and post-trained on roughly 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. It is designed to follow instructions and provide helpful responses for everyday queries. The company has begun public testing of MAI-1-preview on LMArena, a popular platform for community model evaluation. Also, Microsoft will be rolling MAI-1-preview out for certain text use cases within Copilot over the coming weeks to learn and improve the model. "We have big ambitions for where we go next," Microsoft said. "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." Also read: Samsung Galaxy event on Sept 4: Galaxy S25 FE, Tab S11 series and more expected With these new models, Microsoft is signaling that it wants to expand its AI ecosystem with models built in-house. While Copilot currently depends on OpenAI's large language models, the company's new offerings could eventually reduce that dependency.