Microsoft AI (MAI)

'Humanist superintelligence' means building Microsoft's own frontier MAI models for cost and independence from OpenAI, plus grounded, controllable systems for medicine and energy. 'Frontier tuning' lets customers RL-tune weights on their own workflows.

Founded
March 2024
Headquarters
Redmond, WA
Founders
Mustafa Suleyman
Pushes against
Open-ended AGI ambition; says it is not building 'ill-defined and ethereal superintelligence'.
Now
Suleyman handed Copilot to Jacob Andreou (2026-03-17) to focus on frontier models. MAI-Thinking-1 (2026-06-02) is Microsoft's first in-house reasoning model; Microsoft keeps a stake (~27%) in OpenAI.

Key people

  • Mustafa Suleyman (CEO, Microsoft AI; refocused on superintelligence and models 2026-03)
  • Jacob Andreou (EVP, Copilot)
  • Ali Farhadi (called Microsoft's superintelligence leader, reported)

Latest launches

  • MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1 and Voice-2.1-Flash Microsoft · 1 October 2026
    Streaming transcription ranks 1 on Artificial Analysis with first hypothesis in ~100 ms; Voice-2.1-Flash has 150 ms end-to-end latency.
  • MAI-Image-2.6 (and Flash) Microsoft · 4 September 2026
    Image model ranks 2 on Arena text-to-image and editing; Flash variant is 2.8x faster than GPT-Image-2-Medium, per Microsoft.
  • MAI-Transcribe-2 Microsoft · 3 September 2026
    Speech recognition across 60 languages with 5.2% average WER on FLEURS and $0.10 per hour (limited-time price).
  • MAI-Cyber-1-Flash in MDASH Microsoft · 13 August 2026
    Security model from the MAI-Thinking-1 lineage inside the MDASH multi-agent system scores 96% any-crash on CyberGym at half the earlier cost.
  • MAI-Code-1.1-Flash Microsoft · 11 August 2026
    Update to MAI-Code at a quarter of the cost, with 25% fewer tokens, 25% faster streaming and 22% better on Terminal-Bench 2.1 in Copilot CLI.
  • MAI-Code-1-Flash Microsoft · 2 June 2026
    5B-active-parameter agentic coding model shipped in GitHub Copilot and VS Code; Microsoft calls it Haiku-class at lower cost.
  • MAI-Image-2.5 (and Flash) Microsoft · 2 June 2026
    Text-to-image and editing model that Microsoft says tops Google's Nano Banana Pro on Arena Elo; in PowerPoint and Foundry.
  • MAI-Thinking-1 Microsoft · 2 June 2026
    Microsoft's first in-house reasoning model, a sparse MoE with ~1T total and 35B active parameters and 256K context, trained without third-party distillation.

Launches by year

13 launches and papers since 30 June 2025, oldest first within each year.

2026 9
MAI-Transcribe-1 and MAI-Image-2 (with MAI-Voice-1) in Foundry, MAI-Thinking-1, MAI-Image-2.5 (and Flash), MAI-Code-1-Flash, MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, MAI-Cyber-1-Flash in MDASH, MAI-Transcribe-2, MAI-Image-2.6 (and Flash), MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1 and Voice-2.1-Flash
2025 4
MAI-DxO (Diagnostic Orchestrator), MAI-Voice-1, MAI-1-preview, MAI-Image-1

People moves

Of the moves the atlas tracks, 2 joined and 0 left, and 1 changed roles inside it.

Sources

  1. cnbc.com/2025/11/06/microsoft-forms-superintelligence-team-under-ai-head-mustafa-suleyman-
  2. blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/03/17/announcing-copilot-leadership-update/
  3. microsoft.ai/news/building-a-hillclimbing-machine-launching-seven-new-mai-models/
  4. microsoft.ai/news/
  5. microsoft.ai/news/pushing-the-quality-cost-frontier-with-mai-image-2-6/
  6. geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-2-5-superintelligence-leader-ali-farhadi-points-company-toward
  7. microsoft.ai/news/towards-humanist-superintelligence/

This profile was partly confirmed by its sources on 6 October 2026. Some of its claims could not be checked. How we check