Microsoft Launches MAI-Image-2-Efficient, Reducing Image Generation Costs by 41%

ME News reports that on April 15 (UTC+8), according to monitoring by Beating, Microsoft’s MAI Superintelligence team released MAI-Image-2-Efficient, a text-to-image model optimized for production environments. Compared to the previous flagship model, MAI-Image-2, the new model is 22% faster in generation speed and achieves four times higher single-GPU throughput, with API pricing reduced by approximately 41%: $5 per million tokens for text input and $19.5 per million tokens for image output. Speed is the core advantage of this model. Microsoft’s median latency comparisons show: MAI-Image-2-Efficient at 13.7 seconds, MAI-Image-2 at 17.5 seconds, Google Gemini 3 Pro Image at 19.1 seconds, and GPT-Image-1.5-High at 41.4 seconds. Microsoft claims it is approximately 40% faster on average than other leading text-to-image models. Microsoft positions the two models as complementary: the Efficient version is ideal for batch and real-time image generation scenarios such as product images, marketing assets, and UI prototypes, while the flagship version is suited for scenarios requiring the highest detail, such as portraits, photorealistic scenes, and complex in-image text. MAI-Image-2-Efficient is now live on Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground, with rollout underway for Copilot and Bing, followed by an upcoming version for PowerPoint. (Source: BlockBeats)