Microsoft is taking on AI competitors with three new core models

The tech giant’s Microsoft AI Research Lab announced the launch of three basic AI models on Thursday that can generate text, audio, and images.

This release signals Microsoft continuing its push to build its own set of multimodal AI models – and competing with rival AI labs – although it is still associated with OpenAI.

MAI-Transcribe-1 transcribes speech across 25 different languages ​​into text and is 2.5 times faster than Microsoft’s Azure Fast offering, according to a company press release. MAI-Voice-1 is a voice generation model. This audio template allows users to create 60 seconds of audio in one second and allows users to create custom audio. MAI-Image-2 is a video generation model.

MAI-Image-2 was originally released on MAI Playground, a major new program for testing language models on March 19. Now, all three models are released on Microsoft Foundry and transcription and audio models are available in MAI Playground as well.

The models were developed by the Microsoft MAI Superintelligence Team, an artificial intelligence research team led by Mustafa Suleiman, CEO of Microsoft AI, formed and announced in November 2025.

“At Microsoft AI, we’re building humane AI. We have a distinct perspective when creating our AI models — putting humans at the center, improving how people actually communicate, and training for practical use,” Soliman wrote in a blog post. “You’ll see more models from us soon at Foundry and directly in Microsoft products and experiences.”

And in the increasingly crowded LLM market, MAI hopes the selling point of these models is that they are cheaper than those from Google and OpenAI, the company wrote in the blog post.

MAI-Transcribe-1 starts at $0.36 per hour. MAI-Voice-1 starts at $22 per million characters, and MAI-Image-2 starts at $5 per million characters for text input and $33 per million characters for image output.

Despite releasing its own models, Solomon reiterated Microsoft’s commitment to its partnership with OpenAI in an interview with VentureBeat — though a recent renegotiation of that partnership has allowed Microsoft to truly pursue superintelligence research, Solomon told The Verge.

Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in its AI research lab and hosts its models in its various products through a multi-year partnership. Microsoft takes the same stance with chips; It produces its own products and buys from external players as well.