Microsoft AI bets on cheap specialist models instead of chasing the frontier

Microsoft AI is betting on small specialist models instead of expensive general-purpose ones, according to AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. MAI-Cyber-1-Flash tops the CyberGym benchmark when embedded in an orchestrator and reportedly costs half as much as Anthropic's Mythos, but it still relies on OpenAI for hard tasks. Competition is shifting from individual models to the orchestration software that routes and manages them.