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Artificial Intelligence: News, Business, Research
Microsoft has introduced its first in-house image generation model, MAI-Image-1. The model currently ranks ninth among text-to-image systems on LMArena. According to Microsoft AI, MAI-Image-1 was designed to avoid repetitive or overly generic results. The team incorporated feedback from creative industry professionals to fine-tune the model. It performs especially well at producing photorealistic images, capturing details like lighting effects and landscapes, and runs faster than many larger models.
The model is available for testing on LMArena and will soon be integrated into Copilot and Bing Image Creator. Microsoft emphasizes its focus on safe and responsible outputs. MAI-Image-1 expands the company’s own AI lineup, which also includes the speech generation model MAI-Voice-1 and the chatbot MAI-1-preview.
Venture capitalists have already invested $192.7 billion in AI startups in 2025 - a new record. For the first time, more than half of all global VC funding is flowing into AI, according to an analysis by PitchBook.
Major players like Anthropic and xAI have secured multi-billion dollar rounds, while smaller startups outside the AI sector are finding it harder to raise money. Kyle Sanford at PitchBook describes the result as a split market - it's either AI or not.
In the US, 62.7 percent of VC funding went to AI companies, compared to 53.2 percent worldwide. In total, global VC investment for 2025 stands at $366.8 billion, with $250.2 billion coming from the US.