Microsoft's New AI Models Slash Costs by Up to 89% vs OpenAI
The receipt
Microsoft AI's Superintelligence team just pushed two models into public preview on the same day — MAI-Image-2.5-Pro, billed as the highest-fidelity image generator the company has shipped, and MAI-Voice-2-Flash, a speech model built for high-volume enterprise workloads. That alone is a Tuesday in 2026. The interesting part is the deployment list: Bing, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Dynamics 365, Excel, GitHub Copilot, and Azure. Not a research blog. Production infrastructure serving millions of users, with the company's own framing — "Microsoft products, powered by Microsoft models" — quoted directly in the announcement.
Until now, the unspoken assumption in enterprise AI was that frontier closed-weight models came from one vendor, and Microsoft was a reseller.
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