Microsoft is reportedly working on a new artificial intelligence (AI) model dubbed MAI-1, which could be its largest in-house model to date. The company recently created its AI division, which is now headed by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google DeepMind and former CEO of Inflection AI. It is said that Suleyman is heading the development of the large language model and it can be unveiled soon. Notably, Microsoft launched its open-source small language model (SLM) Phi-3-mini last month as a successor to the Phi-2 model.

According to a report by The Information, the MAI-1 AI model is in its advanced stages of development. However, it is said that its purpose has not been determined yet, and it will depend on its final capabilities. Citing unnamed Microsoft employees familiar with the matter, the report also highlighted that the project is being headed by Suleyman. It is believed that the tech giant could preview the AI model during its annual developer-focused event Microsoft Build which will be held starting May 21.

The MAI-1 AI model reportedly contains 500 billion parameters, which makes it the largest LLM created by the company so far. For comparison, the Phi-3-mini model contained 3.8 billion parameters, whereas GPT-4 comes with one trillion parameters. The larger the number of parameters, the wider the knowledge base of an AI model. It also helps in improving the contextual knowledge window of the chatbot. Since MAI-3 has not been released, no benchmark scores are available to judge its performance compared to the top models.

As per the report, Microsoft did not bring this AI model from Inflection AI and instead built it from scratch in-house. However, it might have been trained using data from the startup. It is unclear if the MAI-1 AI model will also be open-sourced like Phi-3-mini, or will require a subscription fee for access. The tech giant could also use it for its own AI products. These details will likely be shared during the company’s Build event later this month.

Separately, OpenAI is reportedly working on its ChatGPT-powered search engine and has already created a domain and SSL certificate for its first-ever search product. Some rumours have suggested that the search engine could be launched on May 9.