In the race to build powerful artificial intelligence, Microsoft has had his hands tied behind his back for years. Now the software giant is free to compete, according to CEO Mustafa Suleyman.
Suleyman recently unveiled a super intelligence team at Microsoft and spoke to Business Insider about how it came about and the company’s future plans.
What’s clear from the interview is that Microsoft will aggressively pursue artificial general intelligence, a technology capable of outperforming humans in a wide range of tasks.
Although Suleyman has dismissed stories of a race to AGI, the new unit puts the tech giant in more direct competition with its partner OpenAI and other companies including Anthropic, Google and Meta.
The superintelligence team will focus on building a “world-class internal research capability” internally, Mustafa, Microsoft’s AI CEO, told Business Insider in a recent interview.
“Microsoft must be self-sufficient in AI,” he said. “And to do that, we need to train boundary models of all scales with our own data and compute at the very latest level.”
This is a significant departure from Microsoft’s approach in recent years. The company focused mainly on building smaller models, retraining existing models for new purposes, and channeling resources into OpenAI rather than trying to build internal frontier models that would compete with the startup’s GPT offering.
Previous restrictions
A major reason for this more limited strategy was Microsoft’s previous agreement with OpenAI. That deal prevented Microsoft from developing its own AGI until 2030, according to a person familiar with the matter. This reflected OpenAI’s desire to maintain control over groundbreaking AI development while relying on Microsoft for cloud infrastructure and capital investments.
The two companies recently renegotiated this partnership. The new deal will allow Microsoft to “pursue AGI (artificial general intelligence) independently or in collaboration with third parties.”
Higher goals
That has given Microsoft the freedom to pursue loftier goals. The new team, called Microsoft AI Superintelligence, has big ambitions for what AI can one day achieve.
Potential future applications include healthcare, energy, transportation systems and lowering the “cost of living for billions of people over the next decade,” Suleyman said.
The team’s mission will be to focus on solving fundamental problems that pose barriers to the creation of these applications, Suleyman said. He mentioned two examples: how to transfer learning so that AI models can teach other models new knowledge, and how to continuously learn to add knowledge to existing neural networks.
Suleyman said Microsoft is making major investments in computing through partnerships with Nvidia, and expanding its own chip development and AI-optimized cloud infrastructure, allowing it to share training and inference capacity more efficiently.
Keep an open mind
Suleyman recently said in an internal meeting reviewed by Business Insider that Microsoft plans to make “significant” investments in its own AI chip cluster to help the company build its own models. These custom chips are part of Microsoft’s broader effort to reduce dependence on third-party hardware and improve the performance of Azure’s AI services.
“It is our number one priority to ensure that this is the highest performing infrastructure in the world,” Suleyman said at that meeting.
In his interview with Business Insider, Suleyman said Microsoft will be open to the models it uses, including open source offerings, anthropic models, OpenAI models – and Microsoft’s own creations, known as MAI models.
“There’s no reason for us to be religious about that,” Suleyman said. “Obviously we are very focused on getting our products working.”
The adult in the room
While Microsoft enters a crowded field of companies with their own super intelligence teams, including Meta, Google, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI. Microsoft is trying to position itself as the adult in the room, emphasizing responsibility and security.
“This is not about some directionless technological goal, an empty challenge, a mountain unto itself,” Suleyman wrote in a blog announcing the new team.
In the interview with Business Insider, Suleyman declined to explain which competitors he considers directionless, but said he believes everyone will support the development of AI that aligns with human interests.
“That should be something that we all take for granted, but it needs to be factually said and reiterated, and it should be the number one thing that humanity focuses on,” Suleyman said. “There is a risk with these systems that they will become extremely smart and run away from us, and we need to design them so that they don’t do that. That requires a humanistic intent that keeps people at the top of the food chain.”
The team invests significantly in safety. Suleyman recently added Trevor Callaghan, former general counsel of DeepMind and chief legal officer at Google, to his leadership team as vice president of responsible AI, according to an organizational chart recently viewed by Business Insider.
The new team comes at a crucial time for Microsoft, Suleyman said.
“We have a huge mission ahead of us,” Suleyman said. “We have $300 billion in revenue, a huge responsibility to make sure that all of our products are AI-first, that we deploy agents everywhere, and that we really make all the workflows that customers use today much more intelligent.”
“We have the data, we also have the distribution and we have the user interface,” he added. “So I think it’s only a matter of time before these things become really, really magical.”
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