AI Lab
Official Microsoft announcements — model releases, product launches and research, each one summarized with every source covering it, by AIBriefs. RSS
MAI-Image-2.6 is now generally available on Microsoft Foundry, ranking #2 for text-to-image and #1 for image editing on Artificial Analysis. Priced at $38.90 per 1K output images, it averages ~$0.048 per image. A new Flash variant generates images 2.8x faster than GPT-Image-2-Medium with 72% greater efficiency.
MAI-Transcribe-2 ranks #1 on FLEURS across 60 languages with 5.2% average WER, and is priced at $0.10 per hour of audio via Microsoft Foundry. It claims up to 10x faster processing than leading competitors, with features like speaker diarization and word-level timestamps.
Microsoft released VibeVoice-ASR-Streaming-7B, a streaming LLM-based end-to-end model unifying speaker-attributed speech recognition and diarization for low-latency real-time applications. The technical report is on arXiv.
Microsoft Research released GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash, distilled pathology foundation models that cut computational requirements while preserving performance for population-scale analysis. The open models are research-only, not validated for clinical use.
Skala 1.1 was trained on 2.5× more data than its predecessor, substantially improving accuracy in thermochemistry, reaction kinetics, and molecular structure prediction. It is now available in CP2K and being integrated into Psi4, FHI-aims, ORCA, and VASP, with a new living benchmark tracking performance.