According to Foresight News, Microsoft has trained a new AI model, MAI-1, internally for the first time at a scale that can compete with models from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The model is led by Mustafa Suleyman, the former Google AI leader who most recently served as CEO of AI startup Inflection. In March, Microsoft hired most of Inflection's employees and paid $650 million for its intellectual property.
The new model is separate from Inflection’s previously released Pi model and may be based on the startup’s training data and other techniques, the people said. MAI-1 will be much larger than the small open source models Microsoft has trained before, requiring more computing power and training data, and therefore will cost more. MAI-1 will have about 500 billion parameters that determine what the model learns during training. In comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4 has more than 1 trillion parameters, while small open source models released by companies such as Meta Platforms and Mistral have 70 billion parameters.
