Microsoft's new MAI models★ 72
Simon Willison's Weblog1h agoReleaseMicrosoft announced MAI-Thinking-1, a 35B reasoning model available to select early partners, and MAI-Code-1-Flash, a 5B coding model rolling out to GitHub Copilot individual users in VS Code. Simon Willison highlights their relatively small parameter counts and Microsoft's claim that MAI-Thinking-1 was preferred to Sonnet 4.6 in internal blind evaluations. He also questions what Microsoft's clean and appropriately licensed training data claims mean in practice.
Microsoft’s First Advanced Reasoning AI Is Here★ 74
The Verge AI5h agoReleaseMicrosoft announced several in-house AI models at Build 2026, including its new flagship reasoning model, MAI-Thinking-1. The launch marks a significant expansion of Microsoft's model-development efforts after it introduced its first internal models last year. Previously reliant on OpenAI models, Microsoft is building more independent capabilities as the companies loosen ties through a renegotiated agreement.