Microsoft Upgrades Its Own Copilot Coding Model to MAI-Code-1.1-Flash Ten Weeks After Launch, Claiming a 75% Cost Cut

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Microsoft rolled MAI-Code-1.1-Flash into GitHub Copilot roughly ten weeks after shipping its first in-house Copilot coding model, adding native image input, faster token streaming, and a claimed 75% cost reduction alongside gains in instruction following and tool use. It arrives with Polaris becoming the default model on every Copilot seat and Visual Studio 18.9 exposing low/medium/high thinking-effort controls so developers can trade quality against token budget per task. Microsoft iterating its own model rather than reselling frontier vendors is the part worth tracking — the cost cut is what makes first-party viable.