Satya Nadella published a post this week about Microsoft’s MAI model family, and the part worth reading closely isn’t the benchmarks. Frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic stay in the mix for the work that needs them. Microsoft built per-task evals, established a quality floor for each workload, and now sends requests to the cheapest model that clears that floor. Harder cases still escalate to frontier models. One of the sharper responses to Nadella’s post pointed out that teams standardizing on a single frontier model for everything are in the opposite position.