Microsoft announces its first in-house models - MAI-1-preview and MAI-Voice-1

Microsoft’s AI division, led by Mustafa Suleyman, has announced two new AI models – MAI-1-preview and MAI-Voice-1. In a blog post, the tech giant said that while MAI-1-preview “offers a glimpse of future offerings inside Copilot”, MAI-Voice-1 can generate a 60-second-long audio clip in just one second using a single GPU, making it one of the most efficient speech systems available to date. The AI Head says that the company will focus on consumer centric AI models.

Microsoft already uses MA1-Voice-1 to power a couple of its features, including Copilot Daily, which has an AI host recite the day’s top news stories, and to generate podcast-style discussions to help explain topics. You can try MA1-Voice-1 on Copilot Labs, where you can enter what want the AI model to say, as well as change its voice and style of speaking.

The MAI-1-preview, according to Microsoft, is trained on around 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. It’s built for users in need of an AI model capable of following instructions and “providing helpful responses to everyday queries.”

Microsoft AI plans on rolling out MAI-1-preview for certain text use cases in its Copilot AI assistant, which currently relies on OpenAI’s large language models. It has also started publicly testing its MAI-1-preview model on the AI benchmarking platform LMArena.

“We have big ambitions for where we go next,” Microsoft AI writes in the blog post. “Not only will we pursue further advances here, but we believe that orchestrating a range of specialized models serving different user intents and use cases will unlock immense value.”