OpenAI and Microsoft looked like an artificial intelligence power couple, but the AI lab’s growth started to make Microsoft feel a bit boxed in. After all, it’s actually the trillion-dollar company, not just a theoretical one. So rather than stay locked into a relationship that was holding it back, Microsoft decided it was time to prove that it can achieve superintelligence on its own.
The two haven’t officially broken up, but back in April, they updated the terms of their relationship in a way that left the door very open for exploring new partnerships and effectively killed their work together on artificial general intelligence. Now Microsoft’s head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, is running the “I’m not officially single, but it’s coming” playbook. In recent interviews, he’s been flaunting his company’s vast infrastructure, which he’s not saying has definitely been held back by OpenAI, but he is saying is far more powerful than just being the processing power for someone else’s model.
“I guess the last 15 to 18 months or so we’ve been on this journey to reestablish our relationship with OpenAI, and it’s taken a minute. I think it culminated in a new contract that we got done in October of last year,” he told The Verge, referencing an agreement between the two designed to last until OpenAI achieved AGI. “And there were lots and lots of different provisions in that, including cementing and extending the partnership, but crucially freeing us up to be able to pursue superintelligence independently as well as keep buying and licensing their models.”
Basically, since that moment, Suleyman has been building up Microsoft’s own Superintelligence team—though it seems like the company wants to get back into the game well before that. “We have seven new models across all the modalities and so on. So it’s been a pretty big shift, and I think a long time in the planning, and a great relief for us to now be in the game and pursuing the absolute frontier over the next few years,” he said in conversation with The Verge.
Suleyman had nothing but kind things to say about OpenAI and Sam Altman, calling their previous work together “one of the most successful partnerships in history,” and referring to the frontier lab as being led by an “incredibly ambitious founding team.” But he was also quick to remind everyone that Microsoft is “one of the largest technology companies in the world,” and it wants to make sure that it’s “not just a recipient of somebody else’s IP that we then slightly modify and adapt and put into production for our products, but we actually can stand on our own two feet and create world-class models.”
Put a little less diplomatically: OpenAI needs Microsoft more than Microsoft needs OpenAI. That’s something Suleyman got much closer to saying directly during a conversation with VentureBeat, in which he was quoted as saying Microsoft was “sort of set free from our contract with OpenAI” back in October.
Even as he denied that there was a “breakup” while speaking with The Verge, he made it pretty clear that his eyes are on a future without OpenAI. “The reality is that we are in partnership with OpenAI for years and years to come,” he said. “They’ve obviously been an incredibly fast-growing company, and they understand that we have to pursue our own agenda as well.”
That agenda appears to be a Microsoft-made “superintelligence,” which Suleyman said is “just around the corner” and believes is “going to be basically the most valuable technology of all time.” Because of that, he said, “There’s sort of no way that, long-term, we could be structurally dependent on a third party for providing that IP for all eternity.”
Suleyman previously told The Verge that his goal is to get Microsoft into the conversation as one of the top four AI labs in the world—in the same conversation with Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. He also admitted that, “in order to do that, we have to prove that we can do everything that we need to from the ground up, and we’re not just going to take from others.”
While Microsoft claims it’s not distilling from OpenAI, it’s certainly taking lots of institutional knowledge from its previous arrangement. And it’s set itself up to continue to cash in on OpenAI’s output for the time being while building its own competitor that it can unleash when the agreement with Altman finally expires. Not a bad spot to be in.
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