On Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, made it clear that he looks up to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
Using the example of winning a bike race, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked what the plan is for when Microsoft’s huge AI future isn’t so dependent on OpenAI. But Suleyman stepped aside.
“I don’t believe the metaphor that there is a finish line.” “This is yet another false frame,” he said. “Everything must no longer be seen as a dangerous race.”
Then he told the official Microsoft line about his company’s deal with OpenAI, in which it reportedly put $10 billion into the company through a mix of cash and cloud credits. The deal gives Microsoft a big piece of OpenAI’s for-profit business. It also lets Microsoft use OpenAI’s AI models in its own products and sell its technology to customers of the Microsoft cloud. According to some sources, Microsoft may also be able to get some OpenAI payments.
Suleyman said of OpenAI, “It is true that we have fierce competition with them.” “They are their own business.” They don’t belong to us or go with us. No one is on the board at all. That’s why they do their own thing. But we work together very closely. My friend Sam and I are very close, and I trust and believe in everything they’ve done. “That’s how it will stay for a very long time,” Suleyman said.
Suleyman wants to make a point of saying that they are close and far away. Investors and business customers of Microsoft like how close the connection is. But the government did become interested, and in April, the EU accepted that its investment was not a real takeover. If that changes, it’s likely that the government will get involved too.
He Says He Trusts Altman To Keep AI Safe
For a while before OpenAI, Suleyman was like Sam Altman in the world of AI. For most of his work, he has been competing with OpenAI. He is known for having a big ego.
In 2014, Suleyman gave DeepMind, a company that was a leader in AI, to Google. Bloomberg reported in 2019 that he was put on administrative leave after employees said he bullied them. He then moved to other jobs at Google before leaving the company in 2022 to become a venture partner at Greylock Partners. A few months later, he and Reid Hoffman of Greylock, who is on the Microsoft board, started Inflection AI with the goal of making its own LLM robot, among other things.
The fall of 2017, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tried to hire Sam Altman but failed. OpenAI fired Altman and then quickly hired him back. After that, Microsoft hired Suleyman and most of Inflection in March, leaving the company with nothing but a big check. According to a story from earlier this month, Suleyman has been checking OpenAI code in his new job at Microsoft. He used to be one of OpenAI’s biggest competitors, and now he gets to learn a lot about the crown-jewel competition.
There’s one more thing to add to this. The idea behind OpenAI was to study AI safety so that an evil AI could not kill humanity one day. Suleyman wrote a book with expert Michael Bhaskar called âThe Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.â It came out in 2023, while he was still competing with OpenAI. The book talks about AI’s risks and how to stop them.
A group of people who used to work at OpenAI wrote a letter earlier this month saying they were worried that the company and others like it are not taking safety seriously enough.
He also said that he loved and trusted Altman when asked about that, but he also said that he wants rules and a slower pace.
As a British person with European roots, he said, “Maybe it’s because I don’t fear regulation in the way that sort of everyone else seems to by default.” He called all of the former workers’ pointing fingers a “healthy dialogue.” He went on to say, “I think it’s great that technologists, business owners, and CEOs of companies like myself and Sam, whom I love very much and think is awesome, are talking about rules.” “He’s not cynical; he’s honest.” He really does believe it.
He also said, “Friction will help us here.” Now is a good time to take stock because these technologies are getting so strong, they will be so close, and they will be there all the time. Even if it takes longer than six to eighteen months, all of this talk is “time well spent.”
They are getting along great with each other.
Suleyman Wants To Work With China And Use AI In Schools
Suleyman said some interesting things about other things as well. About China and the race to develop AI:
Even though I have a lot of friends in Washington, DC, and the military industrial complex, if people think it will only be a new Cold War, then that’s what it will be. It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “They will be afraid that we will be afraid that we will be hostile, which means they have to be hostile, and things will only get worse,” he said. “They are right that we have different values, but we need to find ways to work together and respect them.”
He also said that China is “building their own technology ecosystem” and “spreading that around the world.” We need to pay extra attention.
When asked what he thought about kids using AI for schoolwork, Suleyman, who doesn’t have any kids, just shrugged it off. “I think we should be a little less quick to fear the worst that every tool can do. For example, when calculators first came out, people thought, “Oh no, now everyone will be able to solve all the equations quickly.” We’ll be less smart because we won’t be able to do math in our heads.
He also sees a time very soon when AI is like a teacher’s helper and can talk to students in real time in the classroom as its language skills improve. “What would it be like for a great teacher or educator to connect deeply with an AI in real time, in front of their students?”
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In the end, this means that we might be expecting too much if we want the people who are making and profiting from AI to rule and protect us from its worst effects.
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