New Delhi: Microsoft is now expanding their footprint into AI models, which would be more advanced than what others are offering to their users. This time, the company has released two latest models, which its teams have trained entirely in-house. With the MAI voice 1, the technology major’s first natural speech generation model, the MAI 1 preview is text-based and is the company’s first foundation model trained end-to-end. MAI Voice 1 is currently being used in Copilot Daily and Podcast features that are more interesting than ever.
MAI Voice 1 runs on a single GPU, and the MAI 1 preview was trained on about 15,000 Nvidia H-100 GPUs. For context, other models, such as the xAI Grok, took more than 100,000 of those chips for the training. Microsoft Copilot is primarily built on OpenAI’s GPT technology. This decision to develop its own models, despite having the billion-dollar investment in the latest AI company, indicates that Microsoft wants to be an independent competitor in this space. While they could take time to reach parity with the companies that have merged as forerunners in AI development, Suleyman told Semafor that Microsoft has an enormous five-year roadmap that invests quarter after quarter.
With some of the concerns arising that AI could be facing a bubble pop, Microsoft’s timeline will need to be aggressive to ensure that taking the independent path is worthwhile. However, the company seems more confident; they have big ambitions for where they go next. Not only will they pursue further advances here, but they also believe that orchestrating a range of specialised models serving different user intents and use cases will unlock immense value.
