# Microsoft launches hill-climbing MAI models for Copilot and Excel

> Source: <https://runtimewire.com/article/microsoft-hill-climbing-mai-models-copilot-excel>
> Published: 2026-07-23 16:32:37+00:00

# Microsoft launches hill-climbing MAI models for Copilot and Excel

**Microsoft's Superintelligence team released specialized MAI models that claim to match GPT‑5.6 in Excel and beat GPT‑5.4 Mini in Copilot while using fewer tokens.**

By [Ryan Merket](/author/ryan-merket)
· Published

## Why it matters

The rollout shows Microsoft leveraging its own product stack to create cheaper, specialized AI models, a move that could reshape enterprise AI economics and challenge the dominance of external foundation‑model providers.

On July 23rd, 2026 Microsoft AI published a blog post announcing the rollout of two new **MAI** (Microsoft AI) models built with the company’s "hill‑climbing" training pipeline. The models are integrated into **GitHub Copilot** and **Microsoft Excel**, the first product‑specific deployments of the approach first unveiled at the Build conference in June.

#### From a lightweight code model to a spreadsheet assistant

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