Microsoft Launches Seven In-House MAI Models at Build 2026, Led by MAI-Thinking-1, to Cut OpenAI Reliance

Summary

At Build 2026 (June 2), Microsoft AI unveiled seven self-developed "MAI" models spanning text, image, voice, and speech, headlined by MAI-Thinking-1 — its first in-house reasoning model. MAI-Thinking-1 is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with ~35B active / ~1T total parameters and a 256K-token context window, trained from scratch on clean, commercially licensed data with zero distillation from third-party models. Microsoft reports it reaches 97.0% on AIME 2025 (94.5% on AIME 2026), 94.3% on GPQ