By Maria Deutscher
Publication Date: 2026-10-17 00:39:00
Microsoft Corp. has developed a new large language model that it says is significantly more efficient than leading open-source alternatives.
The company’s artificial intelligence research group detailed the algorithm on Thursday.
MAI-Base-2 is not a full-fledged LLM but rather a base model, a kind of no-frills prototype. Developers turn base models into LLMs by putting them through several additional rounds of training. That extra training usually focuses on adding reasoning features and safety guardrails.
The most capable open-source base model on the market today is DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base. Microsoft says that MAI-Base-2 outperformed it on a series of internal benchmarks that contained science, programming and math questions. Furthermore, MAI-Base-2 is up to 12 times more hardware-efficient by certain measures.
MAI-Base-2 features a mixture of experts, or MoE, architecture, which means that it only uses a subset of its artificial neurons to process prompts. That’s more…
