Microsoft is working on its own AI large-language-model technology, called MAI-1, that could rival the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT.
According to a report from The Information, MAI-1 consists of 500 billion parameters. This places somewhere between OpenAI’s GPT-3 (175 billion) and GPT-4, estimated at up to 1.76 trillion parameters.
The more parameters, the more complex an AI system is. This will often lead to better results, but does also consume more processor power.
The team behind this new large-language model is headed by Mustafa Suleyman, who was a DeepMind co-founder. DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014. He also co-founded Inflection AI, with which Microsoft did a deal in March 2024, paying $650m (£518m) to license the start-up’s software.
Microsoft also hired Suleyman in March 2024.
But what will MAI-1 be used for? That is not entirely clear yet, when OpenAI’s tech is already rooted in the CoPilot artificial intelligence Microsoft has baked into Windows 11 and the Microsoft 365 suite of Office apps. Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI to date is worth approximately £10.3bn.
MAI-1 is far from the only non-OpenAI AI project in the works at Microsoft, though.
In just the past few weeks we’ve seen Phi-3, an AI model designed to use lesser computing resources, and WizardLM-2. The latter was released in April and pulled down within hours after the team behind the release failed to adhere to Microsoft’s “toxicity testing” policies, according to WizardLM-2’s X account.
Advances in AI is a competitive race and, as seen in Microsoft’s and Apple’s reliance on OpenAI to provide the technology – Microsoft having already jumped in, and Apple reportedly in talks to do so – some of the biggest tech companies have taken risks.
Apple is expected to make much more noise on its plans for AI with iOS 18. That will arrive later this year with the iPhone 16 family, but we will hear about it in June as part of the WWDC show.
It will reportedly make significant use of on-device artificial intelligence. By removing the need to send data to cloud servers for processing, Apple will be able to make strong privacy and security claims about its particular flavour of AI.
