By Omor Ibne Ehsan
Publication Date: 2026-10-16 12:57:00
Microsoft’s AI chief told staff the company quietly trained a model that outperforms a key partner’s flagship system at a fraction of the cost, but the market barely flinched, and the reasons why reveal a complicated bet hiding inside the…
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT | MSFT Price Prediction) used its Microsoft AI unit on October 15, 2026, to announce a model that, if the internal numbers hold, could change how far its data center dollars go.
Microsoft AI said it had finished pre-training MAI-Base-2, a mixture-of-experts model (a design that switches on only part of the network for each task) with 80 billion active and 2.8 trillion total parameters. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman also reportedly told staff at an internal town hall that the model beats the one running OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 while using about a quarter of the computing resources OpenAI used.
The stock rose 1.08% to $539.44 on October 15, then fell 0.47% to $536.88 after hours. For a company worth $4.01 trillion, that…
