Mustafa Suleiman, CEO of Microsoft AI and later CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI, speaks at the Axios BFD event in New York on October 12, 2023.
Brendan McDiarmid | Reuters
microsoft announced Thursday that it is forming a team tasked with conducting advanced artificial intelligence research.
Mustafa Suleiman, CEO of the Microsoft AI Group, which includes Bing and First Officer Assistant, announced the creation of the MAI Superintelligence Team and said in a blog post that he will lead the team.
“We’re doing this to solve real, concrete problems, and we’re doing it in a way that keeps it grounded and controllable,” Suleiman wrote. “We are not building some ill-defined, ethereal superintelligence. We are building practical technology clearly designed to serve humanity.”
The decision comes months after Facebook’s parent company meta spent billions of dollars to hire talent for its new division, the Meta Superintelligence Lab, working on research and products. The term superintelligence usually refers to machines that are considered more intelligent than the smartest humans.
Suleiman was a co-founder of the AI lab DeepMind. google Acquired in 2014. After leaving Google in 2022, he co-founded and led the AI startup Inflection. Microsoft hired Suleyman and several other Inflection employees last year.
Top technology companies are rushing to hire top AI engineers and researchers to power their products with generative AI capabilities. This boom started in 2022 with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT.
Microsoft uses OpenAI models in Bing and Copilot, and OpenAI runs workloads in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Microsoft also owns $135 billion in OpenAI stock after the reorganization.
Microsoft is taking steps to reduce its reliance on OpenAI. After signing Inflection, the software company also began using models from Google and Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives.
The new Microsoft AI research group will focus on providing people with useful companions to help them in education and other fields, Suleiman said in a blog post. It also plans to pursue narrower areas such as healthcare and renewable energy production.
“It will enable expert-level performance in any diagnosis, along with advanced planning and prediction in the clinical setting,” Suleiman wrote.
“We want to be clear that we are not building unlimited superintelligence at all costs,” Suleiman said, amid growing concerns among investors and analysts about overspending on AI without a clear path to profit.
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