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Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Inflection AI UK Ltd., during a town hall on day two of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024. Suleyman joined Microsoft in March. (credit:
Getty Images
)
Microsoft is working on a new large-scale AI language model called MAI-1, which could potentially rival state-of-the-art models from Google,
Anthropic
, and OpenAI, according to a report by
The Information
. This marks the first time Microsoft has developed an in-house AI model of this magnitude since investing
over $10 billion
in OpenAI for the rights to reuse the startup's AI models. OpenAI's GPT-4 powers not only
ChatGPT
but also Microsoft Copilot.
The development of MAI-1 is being led by Mustafa Suleyman, the former Google AI leader who recently served as CEO of the AI startup Inflection before Microsoft
acquired the majority of the startup's staff
and intellectual property for $650 million in March. Although MAI-1 may build on techniques brought over by former Inflection staff, it is reportedly an entirely new large language model (LLM), as confirmed by two Microsoft employees familiar with the project.
With approximately 500 billion parameters, MAI-1 will be significantly larger than Microsoft's previous open source models (such as Phi-3, which
we covered
last month), requiring more computing power and training data. This reportedly places MAI-1 in a similar league as OpenAI's GPT-4, which is
rumored
to have over 1 trillion parameters (in a mixture-of-experts configuration) and well above smaller models like
Meta
and Mistral's 70 billion parameter models.