Microsoft builds its first real reasoning AI — and it's better than OpenAI's

Microsoft's new flagship model, MAI-Thinking-1, is its first major in-house reasoning model. Unlike its previous models, it was trained from scratch on clean data — no reliance on OpenAI's models. Microsoft claims it matches the best models on software engineering benchmarks. Why this matters for us: Microsoft's model will likely become the default brain for millions of workers using Bing and Office 365 — the tools most Brown workers use daily for research and drafting.