Microsoft launches hill-climbing MAI models for Copilot and Excel
Microsoft's Superintelligence team released specialized MAI models that claim to match GPT‑5.6 in Excel and beat GPT‑5.4 Mini in Copilot while using fewer tokens.
By Ryan Merket · Published · Updated
Primary source: microsoft.ai
Why it matters
The rollout shows Microsoft leveraging its own product stack to create cheaper, specialized AI models, a move that could reshape enterprise AI economics and challenge the dominance of external foundation‑model providers.
On July 23rd, 2026 Microsoft AI published a blog post announcing the rollout of two new MAI (Microsoft AI) models built with the company’s "hill‑climbing" training pipeline. The models are integrated into GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Excel, the first product‑specific deployments of the approach first unveiled at the Build conference in June.
From a lightweight code model to a spreadsheet assistant…
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