Microsoft Stated to Be Growing AI Reasoning Fashions to Compete With OpenAI

Microsoft is creating in-house synthetic intelligence reasoning fashions to compete with OpenAI and will promote them to builders, The Info reported on Friday, citing an individual concerned on this initiative.
The Redmond, Washington-based firm, a serious backer of OpenAI, has begun testing out fashions from xAI, Meta and DeepSeek as potential OpenAI replacements in Copilot, based on the report.
Microsoft has been seeking to cut back its dependence on the ChatGPT maker, whilst its early partnership with the startup put it in a management place amongst Large Tech friends within the profitable AI race.
Reuters reported solely in December that the corporate has been engaged on including inside and third-party AI fashions to energy its flagship AI product Microsoft 365 Copilot to diversify from the present underlying know-how from OpenAI and cut back prices.
When Microsoft introduced 365 Copilot in 2023, a serious promoting level was that it used OpenAI’s GPT-4 mannequin.
In response to The Info report, Microsoft’s AI division, led by Mustafa Suleyman, has accomplished the coaching of a household of fashions, internally known as MAI, which carry out almost in addition to the main fashions from OpenAI and Anthropic on generally accepted benchmarks.
The crew can be coaching reasoning fashions, which use chain-of-thought strategies — a reasoning course of that generates solutions with intermediate reasoning talents when fixing complicated issues — that would compete immediately with OpenAI’s, the report mentioned.
Suleyman’s crew is already experimenting with swapping out the MAI fashions, far bigger than an earlier household of Microsoft fashions known as Phi, for OpenAI’s fashions in Copilot, the report mentioned.
The corporate is contemplating releasing the MAI fashions later this yr as an software programming interface, which can enable outdoors builders to weave these fashions into their very own apps, the report mentioned.
Microsoft and OpenAI didn’t instantly reply to Reuters’ requests for remark.
© Thomson Reuters 2025