Microsoft is taking on AI competitors with three new core models

Microsoft AI Research Lab, the tech giant’s research lab, has announced the launch Three basic models of artificial intelligence Thursday can create 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 Originally released on MAI Playgrounda new program for testing large 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.

Models developed by Microsoft’s MAI teamIt is an artificial intelligence research team led by Mustafa Soliman, CEO of Microsoft Artificial Intelligence, that was 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 launching its own models, Soliman reiterated Microsoft’s commitment to its partnership with OpenAI in Interview with VentureBeat Although the recent renegotiation of that partnership has allowed Microsoft to truly pursue this superintelligence research, Soliman told The Verge.

Microsoft has invested more than… $13 billion in artificial intelligence research lab It 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.