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.”