Microsoft developing AI reasoning models to compete with OpenAI: Report

According to a source involved in the project, Microsoft is creating its own artificial intelligence reasoning models to rival OpenAI and could offer them to developers, as reported by The Information on Friday.

The company based in Redmond, Washington, which is a significant supporter of OpenAI, has started evaluating models from xAI, Meta, and DeepSeek as possible alternatives to OpenAI in Copilot, as stated in the report.

Microsoft has aimed to lessen its reliance on the ChatGPT creator, despite the fact that its initial collaboration with the startup placed it in a leading role among major tech competitors in the profitable AI competition. When Microsoft introduced 365 Copilot in 2023, a key feature was its utilization of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

As per a report, Microsoft’s AI division, headed by Mustafa Suleyman, has finished training a series of models, internally named MAI, which achieve performance comparable to that of the top models from OpenAI and Anthropic on widely recognized benchmarks.

The team is working on reasoning models that employ chain-of-thought strategies, a reasoning method that produces answers through intermediate reasoning skills when tackling intricate issues that may rival OpenAI’s, according to the report.

According to the report, Suleyman’s team is currently testing the replacement of the MAI models, which are significantly larger than the previous Microsoft Phi models, with OpenAI’s models in Copilot.

The report indicated that the company is evaluating the release of the MAI models as an application programming interface later this year, enabling external developers to integrate these models into their applications.