Microsoft takes on AI rivals with three new foundational models

Microsoft AI, the tech giant’s research lab, has announced the release of three fundamental AI models on Thursday that can generate text, voice and images.

The release indicates that Microsoft is continually trying to build out its own stack of multimodal AI models – and compete with rival AI labs – even as it remains tied to OpenAI.

MAI-Transcribe-1 transcribes speech in 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 an audio generating model. This voice model allows users to generate 60 seconds of audio in one second and allows users to create a custom voice. MAI-Image-2 is a video generating model.

MAI-image-2 was originally released on MAI Playgrounda new software for testing large language models on March 19. Now all three models are being released on Microsoft Foundry, and the transcription and voice models are also available in MAI Playground.

The models were developed by Microsoft’s MAI Superintelligence teaman AI research team led by Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, which was founded and announced in November 2025.

“At Microsoft AI, we build humanistic AI. We have a distinct vision when creating our AI models: putting humans at the center, optimizing for the way people actually communicate, training for practical use,” Suleyman wrote in a blog post. “You’ll see more models from us soon in Foundry and directly in Microsoft products and experiences.”

In an increasingly crowded LLM market, MAI hopes a selling point for 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 1 million characters, and MAI-Image-2 starts at $5 for 1 million text input tokens and $33 for 1 million image output tokens.

Despite releasing his own models, Suleyman reaffirmed Microsoft’s commitment to its partnership with OpenAI in one interview with VentureBeat – although a recent renegotiation of that partnership allowed Microsoft to really pursue this superintelligence research, Suleyman told The Verge.

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