At Build, Microsoft presented seven in-house models, including MAI-Thinking-1, a 35B active-parameter MoE reasoning model trained from scratch without distillation.
The message is not a break with OpenAI. It is insurance: smaller, cheaper and more controllable models for coding, speech, transcription and image tasks.
The important point is not just the announcement itself, but how it changes the balance between AI vendors, customers and regulators.
Sources: The AI Economy; TechTimes; GeekWire; CocoLoop, CocoLoop.