Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft’s First In-House Image Model MAI-Image-1 Debuts In LMArena’s Top 10
Updated on Wed, Oct 15, 2025
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This was because Microsoft was one of the primary backers of the AI sector leader, pouring in over $13 billion, beginning with a $1 billion investment in 2019.
That was until the two companies opted to loosen the grip both had on each other, allowing OpenAI to raise funding from Microsoft’s rivals and partner with them for various purposes, including cloud computing services. This also came with OpenAI transitioning from a not-for-profit company to a for-profit outfit.
The move worked well for OpenAI, as it hit a $500 billion valuation after selling around $6.6 billion in shares, making it the world's most-valued privately owned startup.
Microsoft, meanwhile, began developing and releasing in-house frontier models and partnered with AI leader Anthropic to use its AI capabilities in Microsoft Office 365 apps such as Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.
Now, Microsoft has released its newest AI model, an image generator called MAI-Image-1, which has been developed entirely in-house and is designed to deliver flexibility, visual diversity, and practical value.
“MAI-Image-1 marks the next step on our journey and paves the way for more immersive, creative and dynamic experiences inside our products,” read Microsoft’s news release. “We trained this model with the goal of delivering genuine value for creators, and we put a lot of care into avoiding repetitive or generically-stylized outputs.”
According to Microsoft, the model excels at quickly generating photorealistic imagery such as lighting (bounce light, reflections), landscapes, and more.
Its news release also sported a series of images generated using the model (including a collage consisting of several outputs), using prompts such as:
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A roadrunner sprinting across sand (image link)
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MAI-Image-1 written in the sand at sunset over the beach (image link)
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A man crossing a city street (image link)
MAI-Image-1's capabilities even saw it debut among the top 10 text-to-image models on LMArena, a public platform that evaluates AI models open to using anonymous, crowd-sourced comparisons.
It holds the ninth rank, tied with Bytedance’s seedream-3 model, in a list of 27 models.
However, Microsoft’s score is only a Preliminary one, meaning that its “score is based on pre-release testing and may shift as community prompts and votes evolve after public launch. This model is expected to be released publicly in the forthcoming weeks,” according to LMArena.
Microsoft’s first-ever image generator racked up a score of 1096 points with just 4,091 votes.
Also sitting with a Preliminary score is the current leader of the pile, Tencent’s open source hunyuan-image-3.0, managing a score of 1161 with 14,414 votes.
In comparison, Google’s gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview (nano-banana), which is tied for first position but sits at #2), comes in with 1154 with 526,205 votes.
Do you think Microsoft’s first-ever image generating model will be powerful enough to challenge the leaders of the image generating realm, especially its long-time AI arena consort, OpenAI?
Let us know in the comments below!
First published on Wed, Oct 15, 2025
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