Microsoft’s first advanced reasoning AI is here
Microsoft announced MAI-Thinking-1, a new flagship reasoning model trained on clean data from scratch, along with several other models for image generation, transcription, voice, and coding. The move signals Microsoft's growing independence from OpenAI.
Microsoft announced a bunch of new in-house AI models at Build 2026, including a new “flagship” model: MAI-Thinking-1. It’s an ambitious step into model development for Microsoft, which introduced its initial in-house models last year — before then, it had relied on OpenAI’s models. The two companies recently renegotiated their deal to loosen ties. According to Microsoft, MAI-Thinking-1 is a “medium-sized model” that “matches leading models” on “key” software engineering benchmarks. Microsoft says the company “trained it from the ground up on clean data, without distillation from third-party models.” As for other models announced today, they’re focused on image generation, transcription, voice, and coding. MAI-Image 2.5 and the flash version can do text-to-image and image editing. MAI-Transcribe-1.5 is “five times faster than competing models.” MAI-Voice-2 and the flash version of that model (which Microsoft says is “coming soon”) add 15 new languages and new options for voices. The new coding model, MAI-Code-1, is “inference-efficient” and is integrated into GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code.