Microsoft Unveils Seven Homegrown 'MAI' AI Models to Cut OpenAI Reliance

Microsoft on June 2 announced a new family of seven in-house AI models, the "MAI model family," at its annual Build 2026 developer conference in San Francisco. Spanning reasoning, coding, image, transcription and voice synthesis, all of the models were built from scratch with "zero distillation"—no knowledge distillation from rival models—and a traceable "clean data lineage" sourced from commercially licensed data. The launch was led by the Microsoft AI team (CEO: Mustafa Suleyman), which emphasized efficiency and seamless interoperability as a family. (GeekWire, Mashable)