Microsoft's New AI Models Cut Costs 89% vs OpenAI

Microsoft AI has launched two new in-house models into public preview: MAI-Image-2.5-Pro, its highest-fidelity image generator, and MAI-Voice-2-Flash, a speech model for enterprise workloads. The company claims cost savings of up to 89% compared to OpenAI models. The models are already deployed across Bing, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Excel, GitHub Copilot, and Azure, signaling Microsoft's shift from research to production infrastructure. The move marks the company's most direct assertion yet that it can power its own products without relying on OpenAI's frontier models.