In This Article: (Reuters) - Microsoft is creating proprietary artificial intelligence reasoning models to rival OpenAI and may offer them to developers, according to a report by The Information on Friday, citing a source involved in the project. The company, based in Redmond, Washington, and a significant investor in OpenAI, has begun testing models from xAI, Meta, and DeepSeek as potential alternatives to OpenAI in its Copilot product, the report states. Microsoft aims to lessen its reliance on the ChatGPT creator, even though its initial collaboration with the startup has positioned it as a leader among major tech companies in the competitive AI landscape. In December, Reuters exclusively reported that Microsoft has been working on incorporating both internal and external AI models to enhance its flagship product, Microsoft 365 Copilot, seeking to diversify away from OpenAI's technology and lower operational costs. When Microsoft introduced 365 Copilot in 2023, a key feature was its use of OpenAI's GPT-4 model. The Information reported that Microsoft's AI division, under the leadership of Mustafa Suleyman, has successfully trained a set of models known internally as MAI, which perform nearly as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic on standard benchmarks. The team is also developing reasoning models that employ chain-of-thought techniques—processes that produce answers with intermediate reasoning capabilities for tackling complex issues—that could directly compete with those from OpenAI, according to the report. Suleyman's team is currently experimenting with replacing the larger MAI models, which are significantly bigger than a previous Microsoft model set named Phi, with OpenAI's models in Copilot, as noted in the report. The company is contemplating the release of the MAI models later this year as an application programming interface (API), enabling external developers to integrate these models into their applications, the report indicates. Microsoft and OpenAI have not yet responded to requests for comments from Reuters. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)