Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI and then CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI, speaks during the Axios BFD event in New York on Oct. 12, 2023.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Microsoft on Thursday said it’s forming a team that will be tasked with performing advanced artificial intelligence research.
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of the Microsoft AI group that includes Bing and the Copilot assistant, announced the formation of the MAI Superintelligence Team, and said in a blog post that he’ll be leading it.
“We are doing this to solve real concrete problems and do it in such a way that it remains grounded and controllable,” Suleyman wrote. “We are not building an ill-defined and ethereal superintelligence; we are building a practical technology explicitly designed only to serve humanity.”
The decision comes months after Facebook parent Meta spent billions to hire talent for its new Meta Superintelligence Labs unit that’s working on research and products. The term superintelligence typically refers to machines deemed more intelligent than the smartest people.
Suleyman was a co-founder of AI lab DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014. After leaving Google in 2022, he co-founded and led AI startup Inflection. Microsoft hired Suleyman and several other Inflection employees last year.
Top technology companies have rushed to hire leading AI engineers and researchers, augmenting their products with generative AI capabilities. The boom started with OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
Microsoft uses OpenAI models in Bing and Copilot, while OpenAI runs workloads in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Microsoft also owns a $135 billion equity stake in OpenAI following a restructuring.
Microsoft has taken steps to reduce its dependence on OpenAI. After the Inflection deal, the software company also began drawing on models from Google and from Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI executives.
The new Microsoft AI research group will focus on providing useful companions for people that can help in education and other domains, Suleyman wrote in his blog post. It will also pursue narrow areas in medicine and in renewable energy production.
“We’ll have expert level performance at the full range of diagnostics, alongside highly capable planning and prediction in operational clinical settings,” Suleyman wrote.
As investors and analysts are increasingly voicing their concerns about overspending on AI without a clear path to profits, Suleyman said he wants “to make clear that we are not building a superintelligence at any cost, with no limits.”
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