azure

Microsoft announced two proprietary AI models at its Build developer conference: MAI-Code-1 for code generation and MAI-Thinking-1 for reasoning tasks. The models are designed to run on Azure infrastructure, allowing Microsoft to reduce costs from its $13 billion OpenAI investment while competing directly with Anthropic and Google.

Cline, the AI coding assistant, released version 3.79.0 on April 16, 2025, adding support for Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 model and Azure Blob Storage as a storage provider. The update also patches an action injection security vulnerability and fixes cache reflection issues.

Microsoft released public preview versions of three proprietary AI models: MAI-Transcribe-1 for speech recognition across 25 languages at 50% lower GPU cost than alternatives, MAI-Voice-1 for speech synthesis generating 60 seconds of audio in under a second, and MAI-Image-2 for text-to-image generation. The models are available exclusively through Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and already power Copilot, Bing, and PowerPoint.

Stability AI's Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large model is now available through Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, giving businesses integrated access to professional-grade image generation within Azure's ecosystem. The deployment expands SD3.5 Large's availability across major cloud platforms.