PANews reported on March 7 that according to The Information, people familiar with the matter said that a team led by Microsoft (MSFT.O) AI chief Suleiman's deputy Karkaman Simonyan recently completed the training of a series of Microsoft models, which are internally called MAI. In recognized benchmarks, their performance is almost as good as the main models of OpenAI and Anthropic. The team is also training an inference model that uses thought chain technology to think about problems before solving them, which can compete directly with OpenAI. The person familiar with the matter said that the team has begun trying to replace OpenAI's model with the MAI model (which is much larger than the earlier Microsoft Phi model) in Microsoft's Copilot. This plan will make Microsoft's model compete directly with similar API products from OpenAI and other artificial intelligence laboratories.

In addition, Microsoft tested alternative models for Copilot, including those from Anthropic and Musk’s xAI, as well as open source models from DeepSeek and the Meta platform, according to people familiar with the matter.