Microsoft unveils its own “MAI” models to cut its OpenAI dependence

At its Build conference, Microsoft launched a family of seven in-house models led by MAI-Thinking-1, a from-scratch reasoning model, and MAI-Code-1-Flash, which turns plain-English descriptions into working code. AI chief Mustafa Suleiman said the models beat OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 on internal benchmarks while costing up to 10× less to run.