MAI-1: a new LLM expected to be released by Microsoft
Microsoft is about to launch a new large new language model that could compete with large generative models from Google and OpenAI. This was reported by The Information, citing insider sources.
According to preliminary information, the model name is MAI-1. The launch of the tool will be Microsoft’s first major attempt at developing its own AI model on this scale. The company began building MAI-1 after gaining permission to use models from OpenAI as a basis – Microsoft is the startup’s main investor and has already invested about $10 billion in it.
The development of the new model is led by Mustafa Suleiman, the former head of the applied AI department at Google, who has now become the general director of the AI development department at Microsoft. In March of this year, the company attracted a large number of new employees with experience in the field of AI, after which speculation arose about the possible development of a new AI product.
According to information from the article, when working on MAI-1, the creators rely on the experience and some technologies of Inflection AI, a company that develops equipment and programs for machine learning (one of its founders is also Mustafa Suleiman). At the same time, according to sources, the company is using its own technologies in developing the model, and the new product will demonstrate a “significant leap compared to Microsoft’s previous developments in the field of artificial intelligence” in terms of computing power, training data and development costs.
It is known that the model will have approximately 500 billion parameters (for comparison, GPT-4 from OpenAI has more than 1 trillion, and smaller models like Mistral have 70 billion). The specific areas of application of the MAI-1 remain unknown – everything will depend on the performance of the tool. There is also no preliminary launch date yet – but there is speculation that the company may present the first version of the product at its developer conference at the end of May.
