Microsoft is making ‘significant investments’ in training its own AI models

Microsoft AI launched its first in-house models last month, adding to the already complicated relationship with its OpenAI partner. Now, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says the company is making “significant investments” in the compute capacity required to Microsoft’s own future frontier models.

“We should have the capacity to build world class frontier models in house of all sizes, but we should be very pragmatic and use other models where we need to,” said Suleyman during Microsoft’s employee-only town hall on Thursday. “We’re also going to be making significant investments in our own cluster, so today MAI-1-preview was only trained on 15,000 H100s, a tiny cluster in the grand scheme of things.”

Suleyman hinted that Microsoft has ambitions to train models that are comparable to Meta, Google, and xAI’s efforts on clusters that are “six to ten times larger in size” than what Microsoft used for its MAI-1-preview. “Much more to do, but it’s good to take the first steps,” said Suleyman.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the same town hall that he’s “looking forward to us building model capability, so that we can build model-forward products.” Nadella also made it clear that Microsoft will “definitely support multiple models” in its products, and highlighted GitHub Copilot as “the best example” of that strategy.

Microsoft is reportedly planning to use Anthropic’s AI models for some features in Microsoft 365 soon. The Information reports that the Microsoft 365 Copilot will be “partly powered by Anthropic models,” after Microsoft found that some of these models outperformed OpenAI in Excel and PowerPoint.