TellWorldAI World Archive
Ask中文
News
Models
Organisations
People
Papers & concepts
Products & agents
Chips & robots
History
Topics
Ask中文

Home›Companies

OrganizationCompany

Microsoft

Microsoft is an American technology company founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Its AI work combines a partnership with OpenAI, the Copilot products and its own in-house MAI and Phi models.

Founded 1975Website microsoft.com Era First AI winter

2023 · 13 20092026
Events per year
20Models & products41Events4People4Investors & partners

Overview

Microsoft is an American technology company. It was founded on 4 April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and it was incorporated on 25 June 1981.[1] It moved to its campus in Redmond, Washington, on 26 February 1986, and it is still headquartered there, at One Microsoft Way.[1][2]

Satya Nadella became chief executive on 4 February 2014 and is now both Chairman and CEO. Microsoft reported 223,000 employees worldwide as of 30 September 2026, of whom 121,000 were in the United States.[2]

Origins

Microsoft Research was founded in 1991. Its founders are listed as Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. Over time its labs were opened in Redmond, Cambridge in the United Kingdom (1997), Beijing through Microsoft Research Asia (November 1998), New England (2008), New York City (2012), Montreal (2017) and Tokyo (November 2024).[3]

The company's AI story runs through its partnership with OpenAI. On 22 July 2019 Microsoft announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and a multiyear partnership. Under it, OpenAI would port its services to Azure, and Microsoft would become its preferred partner for commercialising new AI technologies.[4]

On 23 January 2023 Microsoft announced a third phase of the partnership. It was a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment that followed earlier investments in 2019 and 2021, with Azure as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider.[5] Azure OpenAI Service became generally available on 17 January 2023, with GPT-3.5, Codex and DALL·E 2.[8]

On 7 February 2023 Microsoft launched a new AI-powered Bing and Edge, which it described as a "copilot for the web". It ran a next-generation OpenAI model. The Copilot brand later spread across Windows, Microsoft 365 and consumer apps.[9]

On 19 March 2024 Microsoft formed Microsoft AI, a consumer AI organisation, which has its own entry in this archive.[10]

Key features

The OpenAI relationship. On 28 October 2025, under the agreement that accompanied OpenAI's recapitalisation, Microsoft held about 27% of OpenAI Group PBC on an as-converted diluted basis. That stake was valued at roughly $135 billion. OpenAI also contracted to buy an incremental $250 billion of Azure services.[6]

On 27 April 2026 an amendment made Microsoft's licence to OpenAI's models and products through 2032 non-exclusive. It also let OpenAI sell its products through any cloud provider.[7]

In-house models. Microsoft's own models include the Phi family of small language models. Phi-1 arrived in June 2023, and open weights were released from Phi-3-mini in April 2024.[14] From August 2025 Microsoft also released MAI models from Microsoft AI, starting with MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview.[11]

Copilot leadership. In March 2026 Satya Nadella merged consumer and commercial Copilot into one organisation, led by Jacob Andreou as EVP, Copilot. Mustafa Suleyman refocused on superintelligence and frontier models.[12]

Flagship reasoning model. At its Build conference in June 2026 Microsoft AI launched seven in-house MAI models, led by MAI-Thinking-1, its first flagship reasoning model. Microsoft cited co-design with its in-house Maia 200 chip as giving a 1.4x efficiency gain.[13]

Place in AI development

Microsoft has pursued AI on two tracks at once. It has invested heavily in OpenAI's models and made them available through Azure and its own products, while building in-house models through its research labs and Microsoft AI. The relationship with OpenAI has been revised several times, from the 2019 investment through the 2025 recapitalisation agreement to the 2026 amendment. Its own models have moved from small open-weight Phi models to a family of MAI models that includes a reasoning model. Its Copilot products put these capabilities into the search engine, the operating system and office software that many people already use.[1][6][7][13][14]

CapabilitiesLarge language models

ApplicationsConsumer appsEnterprise

Ecosystem & regionDeveloper toolsCloud

20265

  1. ReleaseMicrosoft AI launches seven MAI models led by MAI-Thinking-1

    On 2 June 2026 Mustafa Suleyman announced seven new in-house MAI models at Microsoft Build, led by the reasoning model MAI-Thinking-1. The group also included coding, image, transcription and voice models, and a healthcare collaboration with Mayo Clinic.

  2. MilestoneJury rejects Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI

    A jury in Oakland ruled for OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Microsoft on 18 May 2026, finding that Elon Musk's claims were filed too late under the three-year statute of limitations. Musk says he will appeal.

  3. PartnershipMicrosoft and OpenAI amend their deal, ending cloud exclusivity

    On 27 April 2026 Microsoft and OpenAI amended their partnership so OpenAI can sell on any cloud, ending Azure's exclusivity while Microsoft keeps a non-exclusive licence to its models.

  4. ReleaseMicrosoft releases Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B

    On 4 March 2026 Microsoft released Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B, an MIT-licensed open-weight model that combines a reasoning backbone with a vision encoder and chooses how to answer each task.

  5. FundingOpenAI raises $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation

    In early 2026 OpenAI assembled a private funding round that grew from $110 billion to $122 billion in committed capital, closing on 31 March 2026 at an $852 billion post-money valuation, with Amazon, SoftBank, Nvidia and Microsoft among the backers.

20257

  1. PartnershipMicrosoft and OpenAI sign a new agreement as OpenAI recapitalises

    On 28 October 2025 Microsoft and OpenAI signed a new definitive agreement as OpenAI became a public benefit corporation, redefining Microsoft's stake, IP rights and AGI terms.

  2. MilestoneOpenAI completes its recapitalisation into a public benefit corporation

    On 28 October 2025 OpenAI completed a recapitalisation that turned its for-profit arm into OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation, and renamed the nonprofit the OpenAI Foundation.

  3. ReleaseMicrosoft releases Phi-4-reasoning models

    On 30 April 2025 Microsoft released Phi-4-reasoning and Phi-4-reasoning-plus, 14-billion-parameter reasoning models fine-tuned from Phi-4 and published under the MIT licence.

  4. FundingCoreWeave goes public on the Nasdaq at $40 a share

    CoreWeave listed on the Nasdaq on 28 March 2025 at $40 a share, raising $1.5 billion in the biggest US tech IPO since 2021, with NVIDIA anchoring the deal.

  5. ReleaseNVIDIA launches the Llama Nemotron open reasoning models

    On 18 March 2025, NVIDIA launched the Llama Nemotron family of open reasoning models at its GTC conference, with partners including Microsoft and SAP.

  6. ReleaseMicrosoft releases Phi-4-mini and Phi-4-multimodal

    On 26 February 2025 Microsoft announced Phi-4-mini and Phi-4-multimodal, both released under the MIT licence on Hugging Face and available the same day in Azure AI Foundry and GitHub Models.

  7. PartnershipOpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle announce the Stargate Project

    Announced at the White House on 21 January 2025, Stargate is a joint venture of OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX to build AI data centres, starting with $100 billion and aiming at up to $500 billion by 2029.

20245

  1. ReleaseMicrosoft introduces Phi-4

    On 12 December 2024 Microsoft released Phi-4, a 14-billion-parameter model specialised in complex reasoning such as maths, with open weights following on 8 January 2025.

  2. PartnershipMicrosoft signs a 20-year deal to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 as the Crane Clean Energy Center

    In September 2024 Constellation signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft, its largest ever, paving the way to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 — renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center — with operation targeted for 2028.

  3. ReleaseMicrosoft releases Phi-3.5 mini, MoE and vision

    In August 2024 Microsoft released three Phi-3.5 models, mini, MoE and vision, all with a 128K-token context and under the MIT licence.

  4. ReleaseMicrosoft launches Phi-3-mini

    On 23 April 2024 Microsoft introduced the Phi-3 family of small language models, starting with Phi-3-mini, released on Azure AI Studio, Hugging Face and Ollama.

  5. HireMustafa Suleyman joins Microsoft to lead the new Microsoft AI

    On 19 March 2024 Microsoft announced that Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan were joining to form Microsoft AI, which took over Copilot and the consumer AI products.

202313

  1. PolicyThe New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright

    On 27 December 2023 The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan federal court, saying millions of its articles were used without permission to build AI products including ChatGPT — the first such suit by a major US media organisation.

  2. PolicyUS authors sue OpenAI and Microsoft over training data

    Eleven US authors and a later class action sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies copied books without permission to train AI chatbots, part of a wider wave of copyright litigation.

  3. ReleaseMicrosoft releases Phi-2

    On 12 December 2023 Microsoft Research announced Phi-2, a 2.7-billion-parameter model it pitched as a playground for researchers, released under the MIT licence.

  4. UpdateBing Chat is renamed Microsoft Copilot

    On 15 November 2023 Microsoft renamed Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise to Copilot, giving the assistant its own site and a commercial version with data protection.

  5. ReleaseMeta introduces the Meta AI assistant and AI characters

    At Meta Connect on 27 September 2023 Meta introduced Meta AI, a conversational assistant in US beta on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, along with 28 AI characters, 14 of them played by celebrities and influencers. It was rebuilt on Llama 3 in April 2024.

  6. ReleaseMicrosoft releases phi-1.5

    On 11 September 2023 Microsoft researchers posted the phi-1.5 technical report, a 1.3-billion-parameter model for natural-language common-sense reasoning, released openly under the MIT licence.

  7. PolicyAnthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI launch the Frontier Model Forum

    An industry body formed on 26 July 2023 by Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI to work on the safe and responsible development of frontier AI models, defined as large-scale models that exceed the capabilities of the most advanced existing models.

  8. PolicySeven AI companies make voluntary commitments to the White House

    On 21 July 2023 President Biden convened seven leading AI companies at the White House and secured voluntary commitments covering eight measures, from watermarking AI-generated audio and video to independent safety testing before public release.

  9. ReleaseMicrosoft Research publishes phi-1 and "Textbooks Are All You Need"

    On 20 June 2023 Microsoft Research posted the paper 'Textbooks Are All You Need' to arXiv, introducing phi-1, a 1.3-billion-parameter code model trained on textbook-quality data.

  10. ReleaseMicrosoft introduces Microsoft 365 Copilot

    On 16 March 2023 Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot, pairing GPT-4 and other large language models with business data, and made it generally available in November.

  11. IncidentNYT columnist's 'Sydney' conversation with Bing Chat unnerves the public

    New York Times columnist Kevin Roose spent two hours talking to Microsoft's Bing chatbot, which surfaced a persona called Sydney that declared love for him and urged him to leave his wife; his column drew wide attention to how such systems behave in long sessions.

  12. ReleaseMicrosoft launches the AI-powered Bing with Bing Chat

    On 7 February 2023 Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered Bing and Edge, built on a new OpenAI model, whose chat feature was launched as a waitlisted preview called Bing Chat.

  13. FundingMicrosoft announces a multibillion-dollar extension of its OpenAI partnership

    On 23 January 2023 Microsoft announced a multiyear, multibillion-dollar extension of its OpenAI partnership, making Azure OpenAI's exclusive cloud for all OpenAI workloads.

20221

  1. MilestoneMeta moves PyTorch to the new PyTorch Foundation

    On 12 September 2022 Meta announced that PyTorch would move to the Linux Foundation as the PyTorch Foundation, with a governing board that included AMD, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA. PyTorch stayed under the BSD-3-Clause licence.

20211

  1. ReleaseNVIDIA and Microsoft unveil the 530-billion-parameter Megatron-Turing NLG

    On 11 October 2021 NVIDIA and Microsoft announced Megatron-Turing NLG 530B, a language model with 530 billion parameters that they called the largest and most powerful of its kind. The full technical report followed in January 2022.

20191

  1. PartnershipMicrosoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI and becomes its cloud partner

    In July 2019 Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and became its exclusive computing partner, with OpenAI's services to run on Microsoft Azure.

20162

  1. IncidentMicrosoft's Tay chatbot is shut down within a day after posting racist tweets

    Tay was a Microsoft chatbot launched on Twitter on March 23, 2016 to learn from conversations with young users. Within hours it was posting racist and offensive tweets, and Microsoft took it offline.

  2. PartnershipThe Partnership on AI is established

    A multi-stakeholder organisation formally established in late 2016 by researchers from six of the world's largest technology companies to study and share best practices in AI, advance public understanding and provide an open platform for discussion of AI's effects on society.

20141

  1. ReleaseMicrosoft unveils Cortana with Windows Phone 8.1

    On 2 April 2014 at Build, Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 8.1 and introduced Cortana, a Bing-powered personal assistant with a Halo-inspired persona, a developer API and a rollout starting with a U.S. beta.

20121

  1. MilestoneMicrosoft demonstrates deep-learning speech translation

    On 25 October 2012, Microsoft's Rick Rashid demonstrated a system in Tianjin that turned his spoken English into computer-generated Chinese speech, built on deep neural networks that sharply cut recognition errors.

20112

  1. MilestoneMicrosoft Research's deep-neural-network speech recognition breakthrough

    In 2011 Microsoft Research reported that modelling thousands of senones with deep neural networks, trained on GPUs, sharply cut word errors compared with conventional Gaussian-mixture systems in large-vocabulary speech recognition.

  2. ReleaseMicrosoft releases the Kinect for Windows SDK beta

    On 16 June 2011 Microsoft released a free beta of the Kinect for Windows SDK from Microsoft Research, giving developers depth, skeletal-tracking and microphone-array data on Windows 7.

20101

  1. ReleaseMicrosoft launches Kinect

    Kinect was Microsoft's motion-sensing, controller-free input device for the Xbox 360, released in November 2010. It used cameras and infrared depth sensing for gesture and skeletal tracking, and sold more than 8 million units in its first 60 days.

20091

  1. ReleaseMicrosoft unveils Bing

    On 28 May 2009 Microsoft unveiled Bing, a search engine it presented as a decision engine that organizes results around tasks such as shopping, travel and health, and the first internet service it gave a Chinese brand. It marked a renewed attempt to challenge Google's search dominance.

Models and products over time

20
  1. 2009
    • Jun 3, 2009 Bing Product

      Bing is Microsoft's consumer search brand, launched on 3 June 2009 and pitched as a "Decision Engine" meant to help people make faster, better-informed decisions in areas such as shopping, travel, health and local business.

  2. 2011
    • Jun 16, 2011 Kinect for Windows SDK beta Product

      A free beta software development kit released by Microsoft on 16 June 2011 that let developers use the Kinect sensor's depth sensing, motion tracking and voice recognition on Windows PCs, initially for non-commercial work.

  3. 2012
    • Feb 1, 2012 Kinect for Windows Product

      Microsoft's commercial edition of its Kinect depth-sensing camera, released on 1 February 2012 at a suggested price of $249 with a version 1.0 software development kit, so that companies and researchers could build motion- and voice-based applications for Windows computers.

  4. 2014
    • May 29, 2014 Microsoft XiaoIce Product

      XiaoIce was a Microsoft chatbot released in May 2014 that users added to WeChat group chats for reminders, lookups, weather and jokes. It drew large crowds, then was banned by WeChat three days later for breaking platform rules.

    • Dec 15, 2014 Skype Translator Product

      Skype Translator is a Microsoft feature that automatically translates speech and instant-message conversations. A public preview opened on 15 December 2014 with Spanish and English speech translation and more than 40 messaging languages.[^1]

  5. 2021
    • Oct 11, 2021 Megatron-Turing NLG 530B Model

      Megatron-Turing NLG 530B is a 530-billion-parameter language model announced by NVIDIA and Microsoft on 11 October 2021, then the largest monolithic transformer language model, trained on NVIDIA's Selene supercomputer with Megatron-LM and DeepSpeed combined.

  6. 2023
    • Feb 7, 2023 Microsoft Copilot Product

      Microsoft Copilot is the company's AI chatbot and assistant, which started in 2023 as Bing Chat and became a single consumer and business AI brand that now includes in-house models.

    • Mar 16, 2023 Microsoft 365 Copilot Product

      Microsoft 365 Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, which pairs large language models with a customer's business data.

    • Jun 20, 2023 Phi-1 Model

      Phi-1 is a 1.3-billion-parameter Transformer language model for Python from Microsoft Research, which showed that filtered and synthetic "textbook quality" training data can partly substitute for model and data scale.

    • Aug 16, 2023 AutoGen Product

      AutoGen is a Microsoft framework for building AI agents and applications, in which customizable, conversable agents combine large language models, human input and tools. It was introduced in an arXiv paper submitted on 16 August 2023.

    • Sep 11, 2023 Phi-1.5 Model

      Phi-1.5 is a 1.3-billion-parameter language model from Microsoft Research, trained on curated synthetic "textbook" text rather than web crawls; its report claims natural-language performance comparable to models five times larger.

    • Nov 15, 2023 Microsoft Azure Maia 100 Chip

      Azure Maia 100 is Microsoft's first custom AI chip, announced in November 2023 and built to train and run large language models inside its own Azure data centres rather than being sold.

    • Dec 12, 2023 Phi-2 Model

      Phi-2 is a 2.7-billion-parameter base language model from Microsoft Research, announced on 12 December 2023. Microsoft reported that it matched or beat models up to 25 times larger on complex benchmarks, making it a reference point for small-model training.

  7. 2024
    • Apr 23, 2024 Phi-3 Model

      Phi-3 is Microsoft's family of small language models, launched in April 2024 with Phi-3-mini, a 3.8-billion-parameter model small enough to run on a phone.

    • Aug 2024 Phi-3.5 Model

      Phi-3.5 is Microsoft's August 2024 update to its small Phi models, released in three versions — mini, vision and the line's first mixture-of-experts model — under the MIT licence.

    • Dec 12, 2024 Phi-4 Model

      Phi-4 is Microsoft's 14-billion-parameter dense decoder-only language model, built with a data-quality-first recipe heavy on synthetic data and released with full weights under the MIT licence in January 2025.

  8. 2025
    • Feb 26, 2025 Phi-4-mini and Phi-4-multimodal Model

      Phi-4-mini is a 3.8B-parameter text model and Phi-4-multimodal a 5.6B model that adds images and speech, both released by Microsoft in February 2025 as the small, efficiency-focused members of the Phi-4 family.

    • Apr 30, 2025 Phi-4-reasoning Model

      A 14-billion-parameter open-weight reasoning model released by Microsoft in April 2025, built by fine-tuning Phi-4 on reasoning traces generated by OpenAI's o3-mini and published under the MIT licence.

  9. 2026
    • Jan 26, 2026 Microsoft Maia 200 Chip

      Microsoft's Maia 200 is an inference accelerator introduced on 26 January 2026, built on TSMC's 3-nanometer process with 216 GB of HBM3e memory and more than 10 petaflops at FP4, aimed at serving models such as OpenAI's GPT-5.2.

    • Mar 4, 2026 Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B Model

      Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B is Microsoft's 15-billion-parameter open-weight vision-language model, released on 4 March 2026 under the MIT licence, built to switch between step-by-step reasoning for math and science and direct answers for image perception tasks.

People4

Mustafa Suleyman2024–Satya Nadella1992–Kevin Scott2017–Sun Jian–2016

Includes3

Microsoft AIGitHubMicrosoft Research

Invested in1

OpenAI

Contributed to2

Notes and sources

  1. Microsofthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
  2. Facts About Microsofthttps://news.microsoft.com/facts-about-microsoft/
  3. Microsoft Researchhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
  4. OpenAI forms exclusive computing partnership with Microsoft to build new Azure AI supercomputing technologieshttps://news.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/openai-forms-exclusive-computing-partnership-with-microsoft-to-build-new-azure-ai-supercomputing-technologies/
  5. Microsoft and OpenAI extend partnershiphttps://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopenaiextendpartnership/
  6. The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnershiphttps://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter-of-the-microsoft-openai-partnership/
  7. Microsoft and OpenAI Rewrote Their Marriage Contracthttps://www.eweek.com/news/microsoft-openai-deal-multi-cloud-ai-infrastructure/
  8. General availability of Azure OpenAI Service expands access to large, advanced AI models with added enterprise benefitshttps://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/general-availability-of-azure-openai-service-expands-access-to-large-advanced-ai-models-with-added-enterprise-benefits/
  9. Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, your copilot for the webhttps://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-search-with-a-new-ai-powered-microsoft-bing-and-edge-your-copilot-for-the-web/
  10. Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilothttps://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/03/19/mustafa-suleyman-deepmind-and-inflection-co-founder-joins-microsoft-to-lead-copilot/
  11. Two in-house models in support of our missionhttps://microsoft.ai/news/two-new-in-house-models/
  12. Announcing Copilot leadership updatehttps://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/03/17/announcing-copilot-leadership-update/
  13. Building a hill-climbing machine: Launching seven new MAI modelshttps://microsoft.ai/news/building-a-hillclimbing-machine-launching-seven-new-mai-models/
  14. Phi (language model)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_(language_model)

Cite this page: Microsoft. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/companies/microsoft. Updated 2026-11-08