Microsoft MAI-1 AI model with 500 billion parameters may soon be unveiled: Report

Microsoft is reportedly working on a new artificial intelligence (AI) model called MAI-1, which could be the largest in-house model yet. The company recently created its AI division, which is now led by Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of Google DeepMind and former CEO of Inflection AI. Suleiman is rumored to be leading the development of the big language model and it could be revealed soon. Notably, Microsoft released its Phi-3-mini small language model (SLM) open source last month as a successor to the Phi-2 model.

According to a report from The Information, the MAI-1 AI model is in an advanced stage of development. However, his target is said to be undecided yet and will depend on his ultimate capabilities. Citing unnamed Microsoft officials familiar with the matter, the report also emphasized that the project is being led by Suleiman. It is believed that the tech giant may preview the AI ​​model during its annual developer-focused Microsoft Build event on May 21.

The MAI-1 AI model reportedly contains 500 billion parameters, making it the largest LLM the company has built to date. In comparison, the Phi-3-mini model contains 3.8 billion parameters, while GPT-4 comes with 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 not been released, no benchmarks are available to assess its performance against the best models.

According to the report, Microsoft did not bring this AI model over from Inflection AI and instead built it from scratch internally. However, it may have been trained using launch data. It is unclear whether the MAI-1 AI model will also be open source like the Phi-3-mini or require a subscription fee for access. The tech giant can 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 reportedly working on its ChatGPT-based search engine and has already created a domain and SSL certificate for its first search product. Some rumors suggest that the search engine could be released on May 9.