In the race to build powerful artificial intelligence, Microsoft has had its hands tied behind it back for years. Now, the software giant is free to compete, according to top executive Mustafa Suleyman.
Suleyman recently unveiled a superintelligence team at Microsoft and he spoke with Business Insider about how this came about and the company’s future plans.
What’s clear from the interview is that Microsoft will aggressively pursue artificial general intelligence, technology capable of outperforming humans in a wide variety of tasks.
While Suleyman has rejected narratives about 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, frontier-grade research capability in-house,” Mustafa, Microsoft’s AI CEO, told Business Insider in a recent interview.
“Microsoft needs to be self-sufficient in AI,” he said. “And to do that, we have to train frontier models of all scales with our own data and compute at the state-of-the-art level.”
This is a major departure from Microsoft’s approach in recent years. The company mostly focused on building smaller models, post-training existing models for new purposes, and channeling resources toward OpenAI instead of trying to build in-house frontier models that would compete with the startup’s GPT offerings.
Previous limitations
A big reason for this narrower strategy was Microsoft’s previous agreement with OpenAI. That deal barred Microsoft from developing its own AGI through 2030, according to a person familiar with the matter. This reflected OpenAI’s desire to maintain control over frontier AI development while relying on Microsoft for cloud infrastructure and capital investment.
The two companies recently renegotiated this partnership. The new deal lets Microsoft “independently pursue AGI (artificial general intelligence) alone or in partnership with third parties.”
Loftier goals
That’s freed Microsoft to pursue loftier goals. The new team, called Microsoft AI Superintelligence, has big ambitions for what AI will one day be able to achieve.
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Potential future applications include healthcare, energy, transportation systems, and reducing the “cost of living for billions of people over the next 10 years,” Suleyman said.
The team’s remit will be to focus on solving fundamental problems that present barriers to the creation of those applications, Suleyman said. Two examples he cited: How to transfer learning so AI models can teach other models new knowledge, and continual learning to add knowledge to existing neural networks.
Suleyman said Microsoft is making major investments in compute through partnerships with Nvidia, as well as expanding its own chip development and AI-optimized cloud infrastructure that allows training and inference capacity to be shared more efficiently.
Keeping 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 push to reduce reliance on third-party hardware and improve performance across Azure’s AI services.
“It’s the number one priority for us to make sure this is the most performant infrastructure in the world,” Suleyman said during that meeting.
In his interview with Business Insider, Suleyman said Microsoft will keep an open mind about what 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’re very focused on getting our products working.”
The adult in the room
As Microsoft enters a crowded field of companies with their own superintelligence 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 safety.
“This isn’t about some directionless technological goal, an empty challenge, a mountain for its own sake,” Suleyman wrote in a blog announcing the new team.
In the interview with Business Insider, Suleyman declined to elaborate on which competitors he sees as directionless, but said he believes everyone will get behind developing AI that’s aligned to human interests.
“That should be something we all take for granted, but it actually needs to be stated and repeated, and it needs to be the No. 1 most important thing that humanity focuses on,” Suleyman said. “There’s a risk with these systems that they get extremely smart and run away from us, and we have to design them so that they don’t do that. That requires a humanist intent, which keeps humans at the top of the food chain.”
The team is making significant investments in safety. Suleyman recently added Trevor Callaghan, a former general counsel from DeepMind and legal director 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 pivotal moment for Microsoft, Suleyman said.
“We’ve got a huge mission ahead of us,” Suleyman said. “We have $300 billion of revenues, a huge responsibility to make sure that all of our products are AI-first, that we deploy agents everywhere, and 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 just a matter of time before these things become really, really magical.”
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