ITHome ITHome reported on October 28 that Microsoft announced the release of the MAI-Image-2.7-Preview model in a post yesterday (October 27). Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman proudly declared:"MAI-Image is now the world's No. 2 image editing model!"
In his tweet, Suleyman wrote that, based on Artificial Analysis's image editing leaderboard, Microsoft's MAI-Image series of models has once again beaten Google, Meta, xAI, and GPT-Image-2.5-Flare to become the world's second-ranked image editing model, trailing only OpenAI's GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst (max). ITHome includes the relevant screenshot below:
It should be noted that the MAI-Image-2.7-Preview model currently focuses on "input original image + text instruction → output edited image" and has not yet opened text-to-image capabilities; it is a controllable editing model aimed at existing photos, design drafts, screenshots, or film and video material.
Microsoft emphasizes that it can handle "harder-to-get-right" tasks: overall style changes, relighting, modifying text / symbols in an image, restoration and enhancement of material, as well as complex edits that require understanding the relationships between objects, light, and environment.
Microsoft says that, compared with the previous-generation MAI-Image-2.6, MAI-Image-2.7 improved across all 10 test cases and 7 categories of editing actions in Artificial Analysis's evaluation, and reached category-leading levels in four categories: enhancement/restoration, reasoning-based editing, scene style, and text/symbols.
The largest lead is in scene and style editing, 24 Elo above the next-best model; on Artificial Analysis's AA-Image-Editing v2.1 leaderboard, it ranks 2nd with 1,193 Elo, behind only OpenAI's GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst (max).
Users can currently try it on Arena, Artificial Analysis, and MAI Playground, and only image editing is currently available; Microsoft says text-to-image is "coming soon" but has not announced a date.
The model is still a Preview version at this stage; Microsoft has not announced a public API, pricing, or a timeline for commercial availability; the model weights are also not open, so self-hosting is not possible. Regional availability of the Playground may also be limited.