MAI-Image-2-Efficient: Flagship Quality, 41% Lower Cost
MAI-Image-2-Efficient: Flagship Quality, 41% Lower Cost
Available now in Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground
We built MAI-Image-2 to be our best text-to-image model — photorealistic, expressive, with reliable in-image text.
Today we’re making all that faster and cheaper.
Meet MAI-Image-2-Efficient.
Production-ready quality. Built for speed and scale. 22% faster and 4x more efficient1. And priced nearly 41% lower — $5 per 1M text input tokens, $19.50 per 1M image output tokens.
That’s not just faster than our own flagship. It’s 40% faster on average than other leading text-to-image models2.
Two models, two jobs
MAI-Image-2-Efficient is your production workhorse. Use it when you need volume, speed, and tight cost control — product shots, marketing creatives, UI mockups, branded assets, batch pipelines. It handles short-form text like headlines and labels cleanly, and it’s built to run in real-time, interactive workflows without breaking a sweat.
MAI-Image-2 is your precision tool. Reach for it when the brief demands the highest fidelity — portraits, photorealistic scenes, stylized looks like anime or illustration, and longer or more complex in-image text. This is the model for final deliverables where every detail matters.
Start building now
MAI-Image-2-Efficient is available today in Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground3. No waitlist, no preview — just plug it in and go. It’s also rolling out across Copilot and Bing, with more surfaces like PowerPoint coming soon.
Partners like Shutterstock are already testing with promising results:
“MAI-Image-2-Efficient shows strong progress in prompt fidelity and creative usability across a range of workflows. In our evaluation work, we look closely at how well models translate intent into consistent, production-ready outputs, and this model is trending in the right direction. That level of reliability is what ultimately matters when teams move from experimentation into real-world use.” – Vanessa Salvo, Principal Product Manager, Shutterstock
This is just the beginning. More models ahead — stay tuned.
- As tested on April 13, 2026. Compared to MAI-Image-2 when normalized by latency and GPU usage. Throughput per GPU vs MAI-Image-2 on NVIDIA H100 at 1024×1024; measured with optimized batch sizes and matched latency targets. Results vary with batch size, concurrency, and latency constraints.
- As tested on April 13, 2026. Compared to Gemini 3.1 Flash (high reasoning), Gemini 3.1 Flash Image and Gemini 3 Pro Image: Measured at p50 latency via AI Studio API (1:1, 1K images; minimal reasoning unless noted; web search disabled). MAI-Image-2, MAI-Image-2e, GPT-Image-1.5-High: Measured at p50 latency via Foundry API.
- MAI Playground is available in select markets including the US. Coming soon to EU countries.
