Microsoft is reportedly introducing another player to the AI model market, with its latest iteration titled “May-1,” and reports suggest it might be better than the rest.
Although the tech giant has already invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI, the company is reportedly training a new in-house AI model that can compete.
The news comes from Information who say the development of the big language model is led by Mustafa Suleyman, the former Google AI leader who served as CEO of AI startup Inflection.
Inflection is a California-based company that creates conversational AI that you can talk to. His team created the personal AI called Pi, released in May 2023. Microsoft was one of his investors in a $1.3 billion funding round.
Suleyman and the other co-founder of InflectionKarén Simonyan, were poached by Microsoft in March 2024. Other members of the team also joined the duo at Microsoft.
MAI-1 is expected to be created solely by Microsoft and is separate from Inflection, but it could rely on training data and other technologies since they paid the start-up's intellectual property rights for the sum of $650 million in March.
What we know about Microsoft's MAI-1
Apart from this report, no confirmation or news regarding MAI-1 has been officially released.
Rumor suggests it could have around 500 billion parameters, meaning MAI-1 will be significantly larger than Previous open source models from Microsoft like Phi-3.
OpenAI's GPT-4 is rumored to have over 1 trillion parameters and French AI tool Mistral is rumored to have 70 billion parameter models. Microsoft and Mistral signed a multi-year partnership in February.
While startups are finding their feet and making waves in the AI space like Anthropic and xAI, Microsoft is a massive company that should have the massive amounts of data needed to train the MAI-1 model.
Microsoft has allocated a large cluster of servers equipped with Nvidia GPUs and compiled training data from various sources for MAI-1, according to the source. This includes text generated from OpenAI's GPT-4, as well as public internet data.
The Information further reports that a preview of MAI-1 could take place as early as the Microsoft Build conference later this month (May 23-25) if progress is made in development.
Featured image: via ideogram