The AI Daily Brief · Friday, July 24, 2026
Microsoft has revealed impressive results from its MAI model family and Frontier Tuning service, claiming its fine-tuned models achieve performance on par with GPT 5.6 for common Excel tasks at a fraction of the cost. This strategy allows Microsoft to utilize previous generation hardware and deliver AI at scale.
“Microsoft claims this produced results on par with GPT 5.6 for most common Excel tasks at a fraction of the cost.”
“By routing to the MAI models for lower-end tasks, Nadel said, we can now take saturated frontier capabilities and deliver them at scale and at lower cost through models optimized for high usage products, while continuing to use frontier models for frontier needs.”
“MAI Image 2.5 will now be the default model for PowerPoint and Bing, replacing OpenAI's GPT Image 2.”