Microsoft has been quietly building its own image generator. Announced Thursday by the company’s AI Superintelligence team, MAI-Image-2 has already landed at #3 on the Arena.ai leaderboard—behind only the models from Google and OpenAI—making Microsoft a legitimate player in a space it had previously outsourced to its partners. That last part is worth sitting with. Microsoft has been paying OpenAI billions to power Copilot and Bing Image Creator. Building a competing image model in-house is an interesting business move. MAI-Image-2 is available now in the MAI Playground, with a gradual rollout to Copilot and Bing Image Creator underway. API access is currently limited to select enterprise customers, with broader availability on Microsoft Foundry coming soon.

Full report : Microsoft releases MAI-Image-2, ranked third on Arena AI’s text-to-image leaderboard behind only models from Google and OpenAI, available in the MAI Playground.