**[Microsoft MAI-Image-2.6-Flash Cost-Performance Ratio: 2.8x Faster, Under $20 per Thousand Images]** Beating AI Newsflash: Microsoft AI has launched MAI-Image-2.6-Flash, now available for public preview on Microsoft Foundry. This is an accelerated version of the flagship model MAI-Image-2.6, supporting text-to-image generation, image editing, multi-image referencing, real-time information retrieval, and automatic aspect ratio selection, all while further reducing generation latency and costs. Speed is the biggest highlight this time. The image generation speed of MAI-Image-2.6-Flash is 2.8 times that of GPT-Image-2 Medium, with GPU utilization efficiency improved by 72%. However, this speed boost does not come solely at the expense of image quality. In the current Artificial Analysis image editing rankings, MAI-Image-2.6-Flash ranks third with an Elo score of 1311, slightly above GPT Image 2 High's 1309. For text-to-image generation, it ranks eighth with an Elo score of 1297. The flagship MAI-Image-2.6 performs even better, currently ranking first in image editing and second in text-to-image generation. On Microsoft Foundry, the image output cost for MAI-Image-2.6-Flash is $19 per million tokens, compared to $38 for the flagship 2.6. According to Artificial Analysis' representative image cost calculations, Flash is approximately $19.5 per thousand images, while GPT Image 2 High is around $211 per thousand images. [Original Link]