Microsoft aims to develop large cutting-edge AI models by next year

Microsoft aims to develop large, cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models by next year, part of a push to build in-house alternatives to the most powerful AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic. “We must deliver the absolute frontier,” said Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive officer of Microsoft AI, said in an interview. 

 

“Cer- tainly by 2027, the objective is to really get to state-of-the-art” across models that can respond to or generate text, images and audio. Suleyman’s unit on Thursday rolled out a speech transcription model that Microsoft says is more accurate than rival products in benchmark testing on 11 of the 25 most widely spoken languages. 

 

 

But as with the voice and image-gener- ation models released by the Microsoft AI group to date, it’s a specialised tool built for efficiency and trained on fewer data points than general-purpose workhorses like Claude 3 Opus or OpenAI’s GPT-4. 

 

Microsoft is assembling the com- puting horsepower to build more broadly capable models, Suleyman said. The company in October started using a cluster of Nvidia GB200 chips, expanding the computing resources at its disposal. 

 

“From there, we’re sort of ramping over the next sort of 12 to 18 months to get to frontier- scale compute,” he said. Microsoft’s work had long been constrained by contract terms with close partner OpenAI. 

 

In exchange for the license to incorporate ChatGPT into its products, Microsoft was prohibited from developing its own broadly capable models. That clause disappeared as part of a renegotiated deal the two companies agreed to last year.