The Redmond, Washington-based firm, a significant backer of OpenAI, has begun testing out fashions from xAI, Meta and DeepSeek as potential OpenAI replacements in Copilot, in response to 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 Big 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 expertise from OpenAI and cut back prices.
When Microsoft introduced 365 Copilot in 2023, a significant promoting level was that it used OpenAI’s GPT-4 mannequin.
According to The Information 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 practically in addition to the main fashions from OpenAI and Anthropic on generally accepted benchmarks.
The group can also be coaching reasoning fashions, which use chain-of-thought strategies — a reasoning course of that generates solutions with intermediate reasoning skills when fixing complicated issues — that might compete instantly with OpenAI’s, the report mentioned.
Suleyman’s group 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 firm is contemplating releasing the MAI fashions later this yr as an software programming interface, which can permit 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
