“Meet MAI-1: Microsoft Readies New AI Model to Compete With Google, OpenAI”, 2024-05-06 (; backlinks):
[frenemies] For the first time since it invested more than $10 billion into OpenAI in exchange for the rights to reuse the startup’s AI models, Microsoft is training a new, in-house AI model large enough to compete with state-of-the-art models from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI itself.
The new model, internally referred to as MAI-1, is being overseen by Mustafa Suleyman, the ex-Google AI leader who most recently served as CEO of the AI startup Inflection before Microsoft hired the majority of the startup’s staff and paid $650 million for the rights to its intellectual property in March. But this is a Microsoft model, not one carried over from Inflection, although it may build on training data and other tech from the startup.
It is separate from the models [Π] that Inflection previously released, according to two Microsoft employees with knowledge of the effort…Depending on the progress made in the coming weeks, The Information reports that Microsoft may preview MAI-1 as early as its Build developer conference later this month, as reported by one of the sources cited by the publication.
[500b-parameters—but is it dense or MoE? If it’s dense, then Microsoft must be holding back a lot of datacenter-GPUs from OpenAI and is serious about scaling its own models.]