Microsoft used its Build 2026 developer conference on Tuesday to announce a new family of in-house AI models, alongside a slew of other news. The announcements, delivered during CEO Satya Nadella's conference keynote, span the company's full product stack, from silicon to operating system to cloud infrastructure. Besides the new AI models, highlights include Microsoft Scout, a new personal agent for workplace tasks, and an upcoming Microsoft Surface Ultra laptop designed to run large AI workloads locally.The centerpiece of this new family is MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft's first reasoning model. It's a mid-sized, 35 billion active parameter model with a 128K context window built for high efficiency and performance, but importantly, at a low-token cost. "MAI-Thinking-1 was designed to be good at complex multi-step instructions, long context reasoning, and code generation," said Kyle Daigle, Microsoft Developer CMO and COO of GitHub, at a virtual media briefing ahead of the keynote.According to Daigle, MAI-Thinking-1 was built from scratch on commercially licensed data. The company says independent evaluators preferred it over Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6, and that it matches Claude Opus 4.6 on the SWE Bench Pro coding benchmark. Six additional MAI models were announced, covering image generation, transcription, voice, and code:
Microsoft launches new MAI family of AI models at Microsoft Build
Microsoft is rolling out seven new AI models for Microsoft customers.
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