alt Hacker NewsMAI-Code-1-Flash
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It's a start and I welcome competition but I don't think I ever used small cloud models like Haiku 4.5. They are cute but for serious coding they tend to waste your expensive time.
And this certainly wont bring me back to GitHub Copilot which I cancelled yesterday.
GitHub Copilot had competitive pricing until yesterday when they changed from per-request to one of the most expensive per-token quotas. Seriously, take a look at their burning subreddit for some laughs: https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot
I have since changed to DeekSeek Flash on high which is Sonnet+ level for almost free.
If I feel I still need smarter models I might signup for $20/mo Codex to use GPT 5.5 which, in my opinion, is the best I can access right now.
Does anyone actually uses these smaller models for coding? If so, how? I usually Opus everything. Is the play to plan/design/architect with a heavier model than delegate structured tasks to these smaller ones? Would appreciate to hear someone's opinion on having done and tested both paths.
To understand microsoft IA problems right now, observe that NONE of the models announced are available for use even in the microsoft foundry, which is the place were you add models to your account.
I understand github copilot rollout takes time, but why can't we consume the models via microsoft own api after launching?
Anthropic models are available at foundry the same moment they are launched, but not Microsoft's own models.
What is with people reimplementing window scrolling badly?
It's so weird to me that the benchmarks remain so low, but the models are marketed as revolutionary. And if you say that low coding capabilities aren't a problem, say that to the token price hike and 'general use' model setup.
Why not sell it as a math agent? Why do I have to set up 4 agents to check each others' work?
The introductory blog post has a lot more information
https://microsoft.ai/news/introducingmai-code-1-flash/
and the model card
https://microsoft.ai/pdf/MAI-Code-1-Flash-Model-Card.PDF
The broader announcement of 7 MAI models seems to be where the 5B active in the title comes from
https://microsoft.ai/news/building-a-hillclimbing-machine-la...
The technical report is very detailed and would 'reinforcement learning' of future researchers, Thanks Microsoft!
They are comparing it to Haiku 4.5. Not Opus, not Sonnet, but Haiku, the smallest Anthropic model, 3 versions old.
So I guess the important link the marketing department forgot is this one: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...
Model Input Cached input Output
MAI-Code-1-Flash $0.75 $0.075 $4.50
Comparing to
Claude Haiku 4.5 $1.00 $0.10 $5.00
looks fine.
But they also forgot to include the benchmarks comparing to
GPT-5.4 mini $0.75 $0.075 $4.50
Those would have been helpful.
I’m not sure the message should be benchmarking.
The eye-opener is clean licensed data with filters for AI content (not sure how you do that).
If MSFT builds up using an ethical approach, there is a large anti-AI audience that might take note.
Please test your websites in Safari. Almost all of your iOS users use it by default, and the desktop experience is pretty close to the mobile experience, so testing is easy.
That scroll effect is jank city for me (yeah yeah works fine in Chrome/Edge).
not open weight or at least I did not find anything indicating open weight
If only they had launched that yesterday I might have avoided Copilot auto model selection using a 9x model, quietly burning my monthly quota in a single afternoon.
Is anyone using haiku 4.5?
Why not showcase it against something in a similar domain like qwen3.6 or gemma 4?
Shouldn’t the next model focus not be on code but system design?
Seems like the work from a good system design to code is practically solved.
Now it’s a matter of the design of the system. Or is that represented in these evals?
Copilot brand is tarnished, so time to bung everything under MAI?
I had to remind myself what Haiku is even for. Anthropic hasn't spent a lot of recent marketing on it.
When I need a light model, I reach for Sonnet. It is nearly free on the max plans, and quite fast. I don't see a place for Haiku in regular coding.
Haiku I guess is when you need summarization/categorization at scale.
Microsoft setting Haiku as the benchmark is a low bar.
"It is built end-to-end by Microsoft using clean and appropriately licensed data."
Well still no list nor publication of the training data.
I don't see the point in comparing yourself to Haiku which is not only useless for coding but also old. No thanks Microsoft.
Maybe this will replace raptor-mini as the "free" model on copilot plans? (but I don't see it at all yet on the student plan, in vscode or the cli)
>Build for developers, not benchmarks
That sounds like something you say when you don't benchmark well
How not to flex:
"MAI-Code-1-Flash outperforms Claude Haiku 4.5"
Raw feedback to the team: 1-model looks awesome, 2-The artificially smoothed scrolling on your page feels really bad!
The UI has Mustafa Suleyman written all over. Seems to be as much effort in rebranding MAI as in training.
I personally do not like Microsoft, but congrats them to release this model.
While the scores are not good compare to other open weight model, the important thing to note is their training data (as they claimed) is very clean, without any synthetic datasets.
Gemma 4 26B-A4B scored exceptionally well with 20% less params, so this isn't unprecedented.
Related ongoing thread:
MAI-Thinking-1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48374362 - June 2026 (64 comments)
Mark Zuckerberg must be in crisis. Microsoft releasing models that compete with Claude's models. Meanwhile the only thing anyone knows about Mark's models is that they help you get hacked more easily.
It is good to se big companies like Microsoft launching LLMs. They have large amount of compute power and good scientists to create useful models.
What's with the lack of Microsoft design language on the website? It's painfully obvious they're trying to emulate Anthropic's style here and it looks tacky.
I'd love to see a tokens per second metric. I always prioritize speed over raw intelligence for flash models.
In a few languages MAI means no/never, so it's an apt name for a Microsoft offering.
To be clear about the size of the model: MAI-Code-1-Flash is 137B A5B.
Curious how this handles token cost visibility. One of the biggest pain points with AI coding tools right now is having no idea what you're actually spending per project.
Where's the pelican when you need it the most?
Claude Haiku 4.5 results with 60% fewer tokens. Sounds good, but they don't list token costs.
Would be cool if this were an open model.
“ Build for developers, not benchmarks” is the worst marketing shot I ever heard
Why do websites still hijack scrolling? It sucks
"Mai" means "never" in Italian. Ain't gonna happen.
I'd really like to get back to an autocomplete flow, ideally with some shared and optimized context with the relationship with my larger agent models.
But it seems like, by and large, even the faster models are now aimed at longer-running agentic flows and not sub-1s autocomplete. Or am I wrong about that?
"Clean data" is impossible. Language models have polluted the landscape to such a degree it's impossible to filter them out now. OpenAI has no doubt discarded or muddled their dataset that was used to train the original ChatGPT, so there may be no dataset in existence now that isn't contaminated.
I mean they are comparing themselves to Haiku of all things, geez that's not a good start...
Huh, according to that model card this is a 137B total parameter model.
Performance doesn't seem that good:
- MAI-Code-1-Flash (137B-A5B) = 51% on SWE-bench pro
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B = 49.5% on SWE-bench pro (https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B)
They benchmark against Claude Haiku but Haiku is not good, it's worse than tiny open models you can run locally or via API at 10% the cost.