Microsoft Unveils Three New AI Models to Compete

Microsoft AI, the tech giant's research lab, announced the release of three foundational AI models that can generate text, voice, and images. This release signals Microsoft's continued efforts to build out its own stack of multimodal AI models and compete with other labs, despite its ongoing ties to OpenAI.

MAI-Transcribe-1 transcribes speech across 25 different languages into text and operates 2.5 times faster than Microsoft's Azure Fast offering. MAI-Voice-1 is an audio-generating model that allows users to generate 60 seconds of audio in one second and create a custom voice. MAI-Image-2 is a video-generating model originally released on MAI Playground, a new large language model testing software, on March 19.

All three models are now available on Microsoft Foundry, and the transcription and voice models are also accessible in MAI Playground. The models were developed by Microsoft's MAI Superintelligence team, an AI research group led by Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, which was formed and announced in November 2025.

“At Microsoft AI, we're building Humanist AI. We have a distinct view when creating our AI models — putting humans at the center, optimizing for how people actually communicate, training for practical use,” Suleyman wrote in a blog post. “You'll see more models from us soon in Foundry and directly in Microsoft products and experiences.”

In an increasingly crowded LLM market, MAI hopes that a selling point for these models is their lower cost compared to those from Google and OpenAI. MAI-Transcribe-1 starts at $0.36 per hour, MAI-Voice-1 starts at $22 per 1 million characters, and MAI-Image-2 starts at $5 for 1 million tokens for text input and $33 for 1 million tokens for image output.

Despite releasing its own models, Suleyman reaffirmed Microsoft's commitment to its partnership with OpenAI in an interview with VentureBeat, although a recent renegotiation of that partnership allowed Microsoft to truly pursue this superintelligence research. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into the AI research lab and hosts its models in various products through a multi-year partnership.