Microsoft’s New AI Model MAI-1 Set to Compete with Google and Anthropic, Overseen by Inflection Co-founder Mustafa Suleyman

Microsoft is reportedly working on a new AI model, known as MAI-1, to compete with existing offerings from Google and Anthropic. The specific use case for the model has not yet been determined, but it is said to rival OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft has made a significant investment.

According to reports, MAI-1 will be overseen by Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of Google DeepMind and former CEO of AI start-up Inflection, who joined Microsoft along with his team in March. Suleyman’s team is responsible for building large supercomputers for OpenAI, which are used to train cutting-edge models that are then made available in products and services for wider use.

The collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI is seen as mutually beneficial and poised to have a long-lasting impact. Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott mentioned in a recent blog post their plans to continue building these supercomputers for OpenAI in the future.

While Microsoft declined to comment on these reports, sources close to the matter reveal that MAI-1 is distinct from the models previously released by Inflection, for which Microsoft acquired the intellectual property for $65 million. This new model is expected to be significantly larger than Microsoft’s previous open-source models, requiring more data and computing power and therefore, a higher cost. MAI-1 is anticipated to have approximately 500 billion parameters, less than OpenAI’s GPT-4 which has over 1 trillion but larger than smaller models from other companies.