Microsoft MAI-1 AI Model With 500 Billion Parameters Could Soon Be Unveiled: Report

Microsoft is reportedly working on a new artificial intelligence (AI) model called MAI-1, which could be its biggest in-house model yet. The company recently created its AI division, which is now led by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google DeepMind and former CEO of Inflection AI. Suleyman is said to be leading the development of the large language model and it may be unveiled soon. In particular, Microsoft last month released its open-source Small Language Model (SLM) Phi-3-mini as a successor to the Phi-2 model.

According to a report by The Information, the MAI-1 AI model is in advanced stages of development. However, it is said that its purpose has not yet been determined, and will depend on its final capabilities. Citing unnamed Microsoft employees familiar with the matter, the report also highlights that the project is being led by Suleyman. It is believed that the tech giant could preview the AI ​​model during its annual developer-focused Microsoft Build event starting May 21.

The MAI-1 AI model reportedly contains 500 billion parameters, making it the largest LLM created by the company to date. For comparison, the Phi-3-mini model contained 3.8 billion parameters, while GPT-4 includes one trillion parameters. The larger the number of parameters, the broader the knowledge base of an AI model. It also helps to improve the contextual knowledge window of the chatbot. Since the MAI-3 has never been released, there are no benchmark scores available to judge its performance against mainstream models.

According to the report, Microsoft did not port this AI model from Inflection AI and instead built it from scratch in-house. However, it could have been trained using data from the start. It is unclear whether the MAI-1 AI model will also be open source like Phi-3-mini or will require a subscription fee for access. The tech giant could also use it for its own AI products. Those details will likely be shared during the company's Build event later this month.

Separately, OpenAI is working on its ChatGPT-powered search engine and has already created a domain and SSL certificate for its first search product. Some rumors have suggested that the search engine could be launched on May 9.