{"id":378680,"date":"2026-04-02T18:46:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T18:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/378680\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T18:46:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T18:46:08","slug":"microsoft-takes-on-ai-rivals-with-three-new-foundational-models","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/378680\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft takes on AI rivals with three new foundational models"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft AI, the tech giant\u2019s research lab, announced the release of three foundational AI models<\/a> on Thursday that can generate text, voice, and images.<\/p>\n

The release signals Microsoft\u2019s continued push to build out its own stack of multimodal AI models \u2014 and compete with rival AI labs \u2014 even though it remains tied to OpenAI. <\/p>\n

MAI-Transcribe-1 transcribes speech across 25 different languages into text and is 2.5 times faster than Microsoft\u2019s Azure Fast offering, according to a company press release. MAI-Voice-1 is an audio-generating model. This voice model allows users to generate 60 seconds of audio in one second and allows users to create a custom voice. MAI-Image-2 is a video-generating model.<\/p>\n

MAI-Image-2 was originally released on MAI Playground<\/a>, a new large language model testing software, on March 19. Now, all three models are being released on Microsoft Foundry and the transcription and voice models are available in MAI Playground as well.<\/p>\n

The models were developed by Microsoft\u2019s MAI Superintelligence team<\/a>, an AI research team led by Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, that was formed and announced in November 2025.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt Microsoft AI, we\u2019re building Humanist AI. We have a distinct view when creating our AI models \u2014 putting humans at the center, optimizing for how people actually communicate, training for practical use,\u201d Suleyman wrote in the blog post<\/a>. \u201cYou\u2019ll see more models from us soon in Foundry and directly in Microsoft products and experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an increasingly crowded LLM market, MAI hopes a selling point for these models is that they are cheaper than those from Google and OpenAI, the company wrote in the blog post. <\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

MAI-Transcribe-1 starts at $0.36 per hour. MAI-Voice-1 starts at $22 per 1 million characters, and MAI-Image-2 starts at $5 for 1 million tokens for text input and $33 for 1 million tokens for image output.<\/p>\n

Despite releasing its own models, Suleyman reaffirmed Microsoft\u2019s commitment to its partnership with OpenAI in an interview with VentureBeat<\/a> \u2014 although a recent renegotiation of that partnership allowed Microsoft to truly pursue this superintelligence research, Suleyman told The Verge<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion into the AI research lab<\/a> and hosts its models in its various products through a multi-year partnership. Microsoft takes the same stance with chips<\/a>; it both produces its own and buys from outside players as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft AI, the tech giant\u2019s research lab, announced the release of three foundational AI models on Thursday that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,1071,63053,1682,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-378680","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-microsoft","14":"tag-mustafa-suleyman","15":"tag-openai","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}