\n<\/p>\n
In an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Tuesday, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, made it very clear that he admires OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.<\/p>\n
CNBC\u2019s Andrew Ross Sorkin<\/a> asked what the plan will be when Microsoft\u2019s enormous AI future isn\u2019t so closely dependent on OpenAI, using a metaphor of winning a bicycling race. But Suleyman sidestepped.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t buy the metaphor that there is a finish line. This is another false frame,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to stop framing everything as a ferocious race.\u201d<\/p>\n He then proceeded to toe the Microsoft corporate line about his company\u2019s arrangement with OpenAI, in which it invested a reported $10 billion <\/a>through some combination of cash and cloud credits. The deal gives Microsoft a big stake in OpenAI\u2019s for-profit business, and allows it to embed its AI models into Microsoft wares and sell its tech to Microsoft cloud customers. Some reports indicate that Microsoft may also be entitled to some OpenAI payments.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt is true that we have ferocious competition with them,\u201d Suleyman said about OpenAI. \u201cThey are an independent company. We don\u2019t own or control them. We don\u2019t even have any board members. So they do entirely their own thing. But we have a deep partnership. I\u2019m very good friends with Sam, have huge respect and, trust and faith in what they\u2019ve done. And that\u2019s how it\u2019s going to roll for many, many years to come,\u201d Suleyman said.<\/p>\n This close\/distant relationship is important for Suleyman to profess. Microsoft\u2019s investors and enterprise customers appreciate the close relationship. But regulators did get curious and in April, the EU agreed that its investment was not a true takeover.<\/a> Should that change, in all likelihood so would the regulatory involvement.<\/p>\n In a sense, Suleyman was the Sam Altman of AI before OpenAI. He has spent most of his career in competition with OpenAI, and is known for his own ego.<\/p>\n Suleyman was the founder of AI pioneer DeepMind and sold it to Google in 2014. He was reportedly put on administrative leave following allegations of bullying employees, as Bloomberg reported in 2019<\/a>, then moved to other Google roles before leaving the company in 2022 to join Greylock Partners as a venture partner. A few months later, he and Greylock\u2019s Reid Hoffman, a Microsoft board member, launched Inflection AI to build its own LLM chatbot, among other goals.\u00a0<\/p>\n Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tried but failed to hire Sam Altman last fall, when OpenAI fired him and then quickly reinstated him<\/a>. After that, Microsoft hired Suleyman and much of Inflection<\/a> in March, leaving a shell of a company and a big check. In his new role at Microsoft, Suleyman has been auditing OpenAI code, Semafor reported earlier this month.<\/a> As one of OpenAI\u2019s previous big rivals, he\u2019s now getting to dive deep inside the crown-jewel frenemy competitor.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s yet another wrinkle to all of this. OpenAI was founded with a premise of doing AI safety research, to stop a one-day evil AI from destroying humankind. In 2023, when he was still an OpenAI competitor, Suleyman released a book called \u201cThe Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century\u2019s Greatest Dilemma\u201d with researcher Michael Bhaskar. The book discusses the dangers of AI and how to prevent them.<\/p>\nSuleyman says he trusts Altman on AI safety<\/h2>\n