Microsoft Unifies Enterprise and Consumer AI Under Copilot

Microsoft's reorganization combined its enterprise and consumer teams under the Copilot AI banner. While Suleyman will still work on big-picture strategy, Jacob Andreou, who was formerly a corporate vice president of product and growth for Microsoft AI, became its executive vice president, leading the newly combined teams' engineering, growth, product, and design initiatives. That shift left room for Suleyman to devote his time to pursuing superintelligence and developing new frontier AI models for Microsoft in a time when the competition between leading AI companies -- and the pressure to attract new paying consumers and enterprise customers -- is steeper than ever before.

On Thursday, Microsoft debuted a new transcription model that it hopes will do just that -- and, as it's "half the GPU cost of the other state-of-the-art models," per Suleyman, it's a "huge cost-saving" for Microsoft. The company bills MAI-Transcribe-1 as "pushing the frontier of speech recognition" with its ability to transcribe meetings, caption videos, and analyze call center exchanges in 25 languages. Microsoft's blog posts announcing the model say it was built for "challenging" recording conditions including background noise, low-quality audio, and overlapping speech, trained on a combination of "human-curated" and machine-transcribed transcripts.

Suleyman said the source recordings are a mix of controlled sound booth data and contractors tasked with recording themselves amid background noise, from busy streets to kids running around, plus "vast amounts of data from the open web." Along with existing voice and image-generation models MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Image-2, the new transcription model is now available on Microsoft Foundry and as part of the new Microsoft AI Playground. It's the first time these models are "broadly available for commercial use," according to Microsoft.