Microsoft takes on AI rivals with three new foundational models

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

The release signals Microsoft’s continued push to build out its own stack of multimodal AI models — and compete with rival AI labs — even though it remains tied to OpenAI.

MAI-Transcribe-1 transcribes speech across 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 Playground , a new large language model testing software, on March 19. Now, all three models are being released on Microsoft Foundry and the transcription and voice models are available in MAI Playground as well.

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

“At Microsoft AI, we’re building Humanist AI. We have a distinct view when creating our AI models — putting humans at the center, optimizing for how people actually communicate, training for practical use,” Suleyman wrote in the 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.

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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 tokens for text input and $33 for 1 million tokens for image output.

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

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

Becca is a senior writer at TechCrunch that covers venture capital trends and startups. She previously covered the same beat for Forbes and the Venture Capital Journal.

You can contact or verify outreach from Becca by emailing rebecca.szkutak@techcrunch.com .

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