In an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Tuesday, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, made it very clear that he admires OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin he asked what the plan will be when Microsoft’s huge future in artificial intelligence doesn’t depend so closely on OpenAI, using a metaphor of winning a bicycle race. But Suleiman detoured.
“I don’t buy the metaphor that there is a finish line. This is another false frame,” he said. “We need to stop framing everything as a wild race.”
He then toed Microsoft’s corporate line about his company’s deal with OpenAI, in which it invested a reported $10 billion through some combination of cash and cloud credits. The deal gives Microsoft a large stake in OpenAI’s profitable business and allows it to integrate its AI models into Microsoft products and sell its technology to Microsoft’s cloud customers. Some reports suggest that Microsoft might they are also entitled to certain OpenAI payments.
“It’s true that we have fierce competition with them,” Suleiman said of OpenAI. “It is an independent company. We do not own or control them. We don’t even have board members. So they do their thing. But we have a deep partnership. I’m really good friends with Sam, I have a huge amount of respect and trust and faith in what they’ve done. And this is how it will go for many, many years to come,” Suleiman said.
This close/distant relationship is important for Suleiman to confess. Microsoft’s investors and enterprise customers value the close relationship. But regulators were also curious in April, the EU agreed that its investment was not a genuine acquisition. If this changes, the regulatory mix is likely to change as well.
Suleiman says he trusts Altman about AI security
In a sense, Suleyman was the Sam Altman of AI before OpenAI. He has spent most of his career competing with OpenAI and is known for his own ego.
Suleiman was the founder of artificial intelligence pioneer DeepMind and sold it to Google in 2014. He was reportedly placed on administrative leave following allegations of employee bullying, as Bloomberg reported in 2019, then moved on to other Google roles before leaving the company in 2022 to join Greylock Partners as a venture partner. A few months later, he and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman of Greylock launched Inflection AI to build its own LLM chatbot, among other goals.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tried but failed to hire Sam Altman last fall when OpenAI fired him and then quickly brought him back. After that, Microsoft hired Suleyman and much of Inflection in March, leaving a shell of a company and a big check. In his new role at Microsoft, Suleyman reviews the OpenAI code, Semafor reported earlier this month. As one of OpenAI’s previous big rivals, it now manages to dive deep into its frenemy competitor.
There is one more wrinkle to all this. OpenAI was founded on the premise of researching the safety of artificial intelligence, to stop a malevolent AI from one day destroying humanity. In 2023, while still a competitor of OpenAI, Suleiman released a book titled “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the Greatest Dilemma of the 21st Century” with researcher Michael Bhaskar. The book discusses the dangers of artificial intelligence and how to prevent them.
A group of former OpenAI employees signed a letter earlier this month outlining their fears that OpenAI and other AI companies aren’t taking security seriously enough.
When asked about it, Suleiman also stated his love and trust for Altman, but also that he wants to see both a set-up and a slower pace.
“Maybe it’s because I’m British with European leanings, but I’m not afraid of regulation in the way that everyone seems to be by default,” he said, describing all this finger-pointing from former employees as “healthy dialogue. .” He added: “I think it’s great that technologists and entrepreneurs and CEOs of companies like myself and Sam, who I love very much and I think is awesome” are talking about regulation. “He’s not cynical, he’s honest. He honestly believes it.”
But he also said, “Friction will be our friend here. These technologies are becoming so powerful, they’re going to be so familiar, they’re going to be so ever-present, that it’s a good time to take stock.” If all this debate slows down AI development by six to 18 months or more, “it’s time well spent.”
It’s all very comfortable between these players.
Suleiman wants cooperation with China, artificial intelligence in the classrooms
Suleiman also made some interesting comments on other topics. In the AI vs. China race:
“With all due respect to my good friends at DC and the military industrial complex, if the default framework is that it can only be a new Cold War, then that’s exactly what it will be because it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They will fear that we fear that we will be adversaries, so they must be adversaries and that will only escalate,” he said. “We have to find ways to work together, to respect them, while recognizing that we have a different set of values.”
He then also said that China is “building its own technology ecosystem and they are spreading it around the world. We really have to pay close attention.”
When asked what he thought about children using AI for schoolwork, Suleiman, who said he has no children, dismissed it. “I think we have to be a little careful about being afraid of the downside of any tool, you know, like when calculators came in, there was kind of this gut reaction of, oh no, everybody’s going to be able to solve all the problems. equations instantaneously. And it will make us dumber because we couldn’t do mental arithmetic.”
He also envisions a time, very soon, where AI is like a teacher’s assistant, perhaps chatting live in class, as AI’s verbal skills improve. “What would it be like for a great teacher or educator to have a deep conversation with an AI that is live and in front of their audience?”
The upshot is that if we want the people who build and benefit from AI to govern and protect humanity from its worst effects, we may be setting unrealistic expectations.
