(April 2): Microsoft Corp aims to develop large, cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models by next year, part of a push to build in-house alternatives to the most powerful AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic.
“We must deliver the absolute frontier,” said Mustafa Suleyman, the chief executive officer of Microsoft AI, said in an interview. “Certainly by 2027, the objective is to really get to state-of-the-art” across models that can respond to or generate text, images and audio.
Suleyman’s unit on Thursday rolled out a speech transcription model that Microsoft says is more accurate than rival products in benchmark testing on 11 of the 25 most widely spoken languages. But as with the voice and image-generation models released by the Microsoft AI group to date, it’s a specialised tool built for efficiency and trained on fewer data points than general-purpose workhorses like Claude 3 Opus or OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Microsoft is assembling the computing horsepower to build more broadly capable models, Suleyman said. The company in October started using a cluster of Nvidia GB200 chips, expanding the computing resources at its disposal. “From there, we are sort of ramping over the next sort of 12 to 18 months to get to frontier-scale compute,” he said.
The flexibility and prowess of AI models is determined in part by the number of servers used to teach them to parse relationships between words, images or audio. Microsoft’s work had long been constrained by contract terms with close partner OpenAI. In exchange for the license to incorporate ChatGPT into its products, Microsoft was prohibited from developing its own broadly capable models. That clause disappeared as part of a renegotiated deal the two companies agreed to last year.
Suleyman, who joined Microsoft in 2024 to lead the company’s efforts to infuse AI into its consumer products, saw his remit narrow last month to model development. A reorganisation gave Jacob Andreou, a former Snap executive, oversight of Microsoft’s Copilot assistant for both corporate and individual users, an acknowledgment that the Redmond, Washington, company had failed to build a stand-alone ChatGPT rival for the masses.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a gathering of the company’s model developers this week.
“The primary message was just to emphasise the importance of our own state-of-the-art long-term AI self-sufficiency mission over the next three to five years,” Suleyman said, adding that the company would also continue to host models built by other companies.
The new transcription model, which is designed to filter out background chatter in noisy environments, will start backing the Teams videoconference service and other Microsoft products in the coming months, Suleyman said.
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