Microsoft unveils MAI-Thinking-1, its first advanced reasoning AI

Microsoft unveiled MAI-Thinking-1, its first advanced reasoning AI, at Build 2026 along with seven new in-house MAI models spanning image generation, transcription, voice, and coding. MAI-Thinking-1 is described as a medium-sized model designed to match leading software-engineering benchmarks and was trained from clean data without distillation from third-party models, with other models like MAI-Image 2.5, MAI-Transcribe-1.5, MAI-Voice-2, and MAI-Code-1-Flash expanding AI capabilities for GitHub Copilot, Visual Studio Code, and more.