Microsoft AI

Microsoft AI is the consumer AI organization inside Microsoft. It was newly formed in 2024 and is led by Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded Google DeepMind. Products like Copilot, Bing, and Edge sit under this group.

The confusing part is that Microsoft does two things at once. On one hand, as a major shareholder in OpenAI, it licenses GPT and builds it into Copilot for sale. On the other hand, it trains its own models from scratch under the name MAI. So Microsoft is both a developer and a reseller.

The most common misunderstanding is thinking "Copilot equals ChatGPT." Copilot is Microsoft's product name, and the model actually generating answers inside it could be OpenAI's or Microsoft's own.

The track record of Microsoft's own models has been mixed so far. A coding model released in August 2026 was judged to fall short of DeepSeek on both price and performance. That same month, Microsoft merged its previously fragmented Copilot apps into one, and dropped Mico, the character it had used as the app's face.

"Microsoft unveiled a new AI model" — this isn't about GPT. It refers to a model in the MAI family, trained in-house separately from OpenAI.