frontier models

Microsoft’s push to make frontier models accessible to enterprise customers took a new turn this week as Azure AI Foundry added xAI’s Grok 4 Fast family to its model catalog — a move that pairs Grok’s long-context, tool-enabled reasoning with Azure’s identity, governance, and operational...

Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry now lists xAI’s Grok 4 Fast SKUs—grok-4-fast-reasoning and grok-4-fast-non-reasoning—giving enterprises an on‑platform path to run Grok’s long‑context, tool‑enabled models with Azure’s governance, enterprise SLAs, and integration surface. Background / Overview Azure...

Microsoft has quietly begun preparing the hardware and operational scaffolding to stop being a pure buyer of frontier AI models and instead build — and run — its own in‑house models at scale, telling employees it will invest heavily in dedicated chip clusters while keeping the OpenAI partnership...

Microsoft’s Office productivity stack is entering a new phase: after years of leaning hard on OpenAI, Redmond is reportedly adding Anthropic’s Claude family to the mix and routing certain Copilot workloads to the company’s Sonnet models — a pragmatic pivot toward multi‑vendor, workload‑specific...

Microsoft has quietly crossed a strategic Rubicon: after years of tight integration with OpenAI, the company has begun shipping its own first-party foundation models — notably MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview — and is positioning them inside Copilot and Azure as the start of a long-term bid to...

Microsoft’s AI unit has publicly launched two in‑house models — MAI‑Voice‑1 and MAI‑1‑preview — signaling a deliberate shift from purely integrating third‑party frontier models toward building product‑focused models Microsoft can own, tune, and route inside Copilot and Azure. Background...

Microsoft has quietly shipped its first fully in‑house AI models — MAI‑Voice‑1 and MAI‑1‑preview — marking a deliberate shift in strategy that reduces dependence on OpenAI’s stack and accelerates Microsoft’s plan to own more of the compute, models, and product surface area that power Copilot...