Tech giant Microsoft (MSFT) has begun testing its in-house artificial intelligence (AI) models that will compete directly with partner OpenAI while also reducing reliance on the ChatGPT maker. The company has launched two customer-focused AI models under its MAI (Microsoft Artificial Intelligence) brand, named MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview. The announcement was made by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman in an X post yesterday.
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The MAI-Voice-1 model is a speech-generation system that can produce an audio of about a minute in under one second. Meanwhile, the MAI-1-preview model is a text-based system designed to follow instructions and reply to routine questions in a conversational manner.
Here’s How Microsoft Seeks to Compete in AI
The MAI-1-preview is the company’s first language model that is trained completely in-house, from start to finish, without any help from OpenAI. The model was trained on about 15,000 Nvidia (NVDA) H100 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and is now available for public testing on the LMArena platform. The model is considered highly cost-effective compared to rivals such as xAI’s Grok, which was trained on more than 100,000 GPUs.
Notably, Microsoft has already integrated MAI-Voice-1 into several products, such as Copilot Daily, where the model narrates daily news stories and hosts podcasts. It is also available for testing on Microsoft’s Copilot Labs. With these models, Microsoft is expanding its focus to consumer-oriented AI, aiming to create helpful, expressive, and accessible AI companions for everyday use.
To date, Microsoft has invested up to $13 billion in OpenAI and has been largely dependent on the startup for AI models. However, recent tensions between the two parties, related to OpenAI’s transformation to a public entity, Microsoft’s equity terms, and cloud exclusivity, have prompted Microsoft to strengthen its own AI capabilities. Suleyman has stressed the importance of developing “in-house expertise to create the strongest models in the world.”
Is MSFT Stock a Buy, Hold, or Sell?
On TipRanks, MSFT stock has a Strong Buy consensus rating based on 33 Buys and one Hold rating. The average Microsoft price target of $624.08 implies 22.5% upside potential from current levels. Year-to-date, MSFT stock has gained 21.6%.
