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At Microsoft’s annual Build conference, it announced a slew of expanded AI initiatives, billing itself as a major competitor in AI for the first time in a while.
‘We have to prove that we can do everything that we need to from the ground up,’ said AI chief Mustafa Suleyman.
At Microsoft’s annual Build conference on Tuesday, the company announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives, including a super app, in-house reasoning models, a cybersecurity tool, and OpenClaw-esque AI agents. All this news added up to a clear message: Microsoft is positioned to be one of the biggest players in AI, and it’s finally acting like it.
For years, Microsoft’s AI business leaned hard on its early and exclusive partnership with OpenAI. But the drama-filled marriage slowly devolved into a situationship, and the pair effectively separated in late April (though Microsoft is still OpenAI’s primary cloud partner — for now). This year’s Build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcée posting a thirst trap on Instagram. “It’s always fun to be at developer conferences in times of great change,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said onstage Tuesday, adding that events like this are about “coming to grips with the new opportunity.”
AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, in an interview with The Verge, put it even more bluntly.
“The goal is to prove that we can become one of the top four labs in the world,” Suleyman said. “There’s three labs that matter, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We are not one of them at the moment, and that’s always been my intention. It’s why I came here. I want to build the very best frontier models in the world, fully multimodal, and in order to do that, we have to prove that we can do everything that we need to from the ground up, and we’re not just going to take from others.”
One of Microsoft’s first steps at Build was indeed to play catch-up on AI models. Suleyman unveiled MAI-Thinking-1, the company’s first reasoning model, along with six other new models focused on image, voice, transcription, and coding. Microsoft said the medium-size MAI-Thinking-1 model, which will likely be marketed to primarily enterprise clients, is “built from scratch for serious math, coding, and real-world enterprise deployment.” Microsoft is years behind both OpenAI and Anthropic here; OpenAI began releasing reasoning models in the fall of 2024. But Suleyman emphasized its performance on benchmarks like coding and its price point, saying it was cheaper than OpenAI equivalents on some tasks — a big deal in the age of the AI money squeeze, which has inspired a lot of complaints with customers.