Microsoft AI chief says the company beat OpenAI at its own game, using a quarter of the computing power

Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI.

Stephen Brashear/Getty Images Microsoft AI recently announced its latest model MAI-Base-2.

AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman compared the model to a similar offering from OpenAI.

Microsoft trained its model more efficiently than OpenAI, he said in an internal meeting.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told employees an in-house model was better than a similar offering from OpenAI , one of the software giant's biggest customers and partners.

"We now have a stronger pre-trained base model than the model that currently powers GPT 5.6 Sol," Suleyman said during a town hall meeting with employees on Thursday.

"And in fact, we used one-quarter of the compute that OpenAI used to train their model." Pre-training is the first stage of building an AI model, when it learns patterns from huge amounts of text, images, and other information.

This takes massive amounts of expensive computing power, so Microsoft could save money if it's worked out a way to do this more efficiently.

Microsoft announced the model, MAI-Base-2, earlier on Thursday .

Suleyman said Microsoft privately tested this model against OpenAI models, including one nicknamed "Spud" that powers GPT-5.6.

He added that Microsoft's model performed better on tests measuring how well AI can understand and predict patterns in information.

The comparisons are based on technical information Microsoft has about OpenAI's models, Suleyman said.

"Privately and confidentially, we've also compared it to the OpenAI models," Suleyman told employees, while suggesting that Microsoft has special access to information on how OpenAI models perform.

It's notable that Suleyman would choose to highlight limitations of OpenAI models, even in private discussions.