Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman describes the company’s current strategy as the greatest game of catchup ever played. The firm is developing homegrown frontier AI models to compete directly with Google, Anthropic, and its partner OpenAI.
Suleyman told Semafor that Microsoft’s internal offerings now match the industry’s state-of-the-art performance from only a few months ago. The company is training these new models without distillation to establish technical legitimacy and enterprise trust. This approach avoids the common practice of training smaller models on the outputs of larger ones.
Suleyman will unveil a new reasoning model called MAI-Thinking-1 at the upcoming Build conference. This launch emphasizes Microsoft’s commitment to building its own core AI technology from the ground up.