Microsoft AI chief says his model beat OpenAI's using a quarter the compute

Mustafa Suleyman told his own staff that Microsoft's in-house model outperforms the OpenAI system powering GPT-5.6. He says it did that with roughly 75% less compute, and the timing is the real story given Microsoft is still OpenAI's biggest financial backer. Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, told employees that the company's new MAI-Base-2 model beats the OpenAI model that powers GPT-5.6, according to a report from TechCrunch. The claim: MAI-Base-2 used about a quarter of the compute that OpenAI spent training its comparable system, internally nicknamed Spud. Suleyman went further and said Microsoft privately benchmarked MAI-Base-2 directly against that OpenAI model on tests measuring how well an AI understands and predicts patterns in information, and that Microsoft's model came out ahead. He didn't stop at OpenAI.