Paul Soulos

Super excited to announce seven new world-class MAI models today. They represent what we consider a new era in AI designed to keep you in control and on the frontier. First is our text foundation model, MAI-Thinking-1, exceptionally strong on reasoning and SWE tasks. - It’s a 35B active parameter MoE with a 256K context window. Independent human raters on Surge prefer it for overall quality in blind side-by-sides versus Sonnet 4.6, and it’s achieved 97% on AIME 2025, the key measure of its general-purpose reasoning abilities. - It's at 53% on SWE Bench Pro, placing it right alongside Opus 4.6 on one of the toughest coding benchmarks. - And since we co-designed our models with our own silicon, MAI-Thinking-1 is optimized on our MAIA 200 chip. Benchmarking head-to-head against the GB200, we see 30% better performance per dollar as well as a 1.4x performance-per-watt gain when running our MAI models on the MAIA 200 end-to-end. Next is MAI-Image-2.5 and its Flash variant. Two super strong models now at #2 on the leaderboards, surpassing the score of Nano Banana 2 on image editing. Last for now is MAI-Code-1-Flash, our new inference efficient coding model, especially tuned for VS Code and GitHub Copilot CLI. - Code-1-Flash achieves 51% on SWE Bench Pro, despite having just 5B parameters, putting it closer to Haiku in size but cheaper in cost. All of this is the foundation for Microsoft Frontier Tuning. It lets you customize our models to create custom, company-specific agents that only you control. You can make our model, your model. Your data. Your agents. Your moat. Early adopters are already seeing a difference. When we tuned our models for McKinsey’s tasks, MAI delivered the highest win rate, outperforming GPT-5.5 on quality, while being 10x lower on cost. Also really excited to be collaborating with the amazing team at Mayo Clinic to jointly train a new frontier AI model for healthcare. Our announcements today mark another milestone on the road to humanist superintelligence. You can learn more and about our other new models in our latest blog: microsoft.ai/news/building-a…

We believe this is the first documented case of a large-scale AI cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention. It has significant implications for cybersecurity in the age of AI agents. Read more: anthropic.com/news/disruptin…

The only bitter lesson is that LLMs have succeeded beyond any expert expectations. Underpinning LLMs is the idea of scaling, which is too often misunderstood as more parameters. Scaling is about using massive compute effectively to maximise the throughput of data ingestion into the learning process to obtain more capable models. We are still far from hitting the limits in this. We are still compute hungry because there is a ton more we could achieve if only we had more compute, from experimental ablations to data acquisition and curation. Scaling is largely about data and evals. The models are now trained on almost all the web and equally large (but growing) self generated synthetic data. sifting through such vasts quantities of data (the whole of the human creation) requires formidable engineering and intelligent ideas. This is what differentiates most models. AI is finally in the hands of billions of users, and with it come billions of tasks - every reasonable user need. This scaling in tasks and evaluations is many orders of magnitude larger than pre-LLMs. Having the right architecture matters, but we know several alternatives could all work well, eg replacing attention in Transformers for RNNs and interleaving such layers with local layers. What matters is fine ablations to maximise hardware usage. This is the realm of sophisticated high-precision engineering. It encompasses semiconductor design, datacenter design, distributed systems, MFU, etc. There is fascinating work on flow matching, JEPA, sparser MoEs, etc, that is all consistent with scaling. I’m terrible at predictions, but in this we have stayed the course. There’s been pleasant surprises like the effectiveness of reasoning, which while allowing for less parameters, still demands even more compute. Sparser multimodal MoEs also will allow for better continual learning. This is an old idea, eg arxiv.org/pdf/1108.3298, which is finally being done at scale. Successful scaling is mostly about organising people into effective teams for research, development and production. They have to be teams of happy and ambitious people who put the team first. Yes, tech VCs and CEOs: work life balance matters to achieve prologued success, something I think @demishassabis did really well at @GoogleDeepMind and which I promote at @MicrosoftAI. Bitter lesson: it really is all about scaling and hard work by thousands of amazing people. Hardly bitter, but hopeful and inspiring.

🚀 Introducing NSA: A Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention mechanism for ultra-fast long-context training & inference! Core components of NSA: • Dynamic hierarchical sparse strategy • Coarse-grained token compression • Fine-grained token selection 💡 With optimized design for modern hardware, NSA speeds up inference while reducing pre-training costs—without compromising performance. It matches or outperforms Full Attention models on general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and instruction-based reasoning. 📖 For more details, check out our paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2502.11089