By Ana-Maria Stanciuc
Publication Date: 2026-03-19 19:44:00
The second version of Microsoft’s in-house image model lands at #3 on Arena.ai’s leaderboard, behind only Google and OpenAI, and begins rolling out across Copilot and Bing Image Creator today.
A year ago, Microsoft was generating images for Bing and Copilot almost entirely with OpenAI’s models. On Thursday, the company’s in-house team announced MAI-Image-2, a second-generation image model that has debuted at number three on the Arena.ai text-to-image leaderboard, placing Microsoft’s own technology directly behind Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash and OpenAI’s GPT Image 1.5.
The announcement comes from the Microsoft AI Superintelligence team, the internal research group that Mustafa Suleyman formed in November 2025 and now leads full-time following a leadership reorganisation at Microsoft announced just two days ago.
Mustafa Suleyman stepped back from his broader CEO role at Microsoft AI on Monday to focus exclusively on that team and its…
