Microsoft Aims at ‘Superintelligence’ After Revising OpenAI Ties

Mustafa Suleyman Photographer: David Ryder/Bloomberg Photo by David Ryder /Bloomberg

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(Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp. is pursuing a more powerful form of AI called “superintelligence” it hopes will be capable of making advances in areas like medicine and materials science.

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Mustafa Suleyman, chief of the Microsoft AI group, will lead what the company is calling a Humanist Superintelligence team that will target hypothetical milestones that are even more ambitious than  artificial general intelligence. That’s the often ambiguous term that outfits like OpenAI use to describe systems capable of demonstrating human-level performance. Previously Microsoft had agreed not to pursue AGI as part of its partnership with OpenAI. 

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“If AGI is often seen as the point at which an AI can match human performance at all tasks, then superintelligence is when it can go far beyond that performance,” Suleyman said in a blog post on Thursday announcing the push, which he says will work toward personal AI companions and breakthroughs in health care and clean energy.

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OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc. and other companies are also increasingly focusing on superintelligence as the new goalpost for AI development.

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The announcement comes in the wake of a renegotiated agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI that determined the software maker’s stake in the startup and altered portions of their relationship. That included removing a prior prohibition on Microsoft’s development of advanced AI tools, which had limited much of the Redmond, Washington-based company’s work to smaller, less broadly capable models than those that power ChatGPT. 

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Thursday’s announcement formalizes a project that Microsoft had been laying the groundwork for since last March, when the company hired Suleyman and licensed the intellectual property of his startup, Inflection AI. With a combination of reorganized Microsoft teams and new hires, Suleyman set about building a new family of Microsoft AI models, which to date remain much smaller in scale than the most capable products from OpenAI or Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

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Suleyman told employees in September that Microsoft would make “significant investments” to expand the capability of those models. 

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