Microsoft, freed from its reliance on OpenAI, is now chasing 'superintelligence'-and AI chief Mustafa Suleyman wants to ensure it serves humanity | Fortune

"Because of Microsoft's landmark deal with OpenAI, the company was barred from pursuing its own AGI research. The agreement even capped how large of a model Microsoft could train, restricting the company from building systems beyond a certain computing threshold. (This limit was measured in FLOPS, or the number of mathematical calculations an AI model performs per second. It is a rough approximation of the cumulative computing power used to train a model.)"

""For a company of our scale, that's a big limitation," Suleyman told Fortune. That's all changing now: Suleyman announced the formation of the new MAI Superintelligence Team on Thursday. Led by Suleyman and part of the broader Microsoft AI business, the team will work towards "Humanist Superintelligence (HSI)," which Suleyman defined in a blog post as "incredibly advanced AI capabilities that always work for, in service of, people and humanity more generally.""

"Microsoft is the just latest company to rebrand its advanced AI efforts as a drive towards "superintelligence"-the idea of artificial intelligence systems that would potentially be wiser than all of humanity combined smarts. But for now, it's better marketing than science. No such systems currently exist and scientists debate whether superintelligence is even achievable with current AI methods.That has not stopped companies, however, from announcing superintelligence as a goal and setting up teams branded as "superintelligence.""

Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft in March 2024 to lead the company's consumer AI unit, which includes products like Copilot. The company's landmark deal with OpenAI barred Microsoft from pursuing its own AGI research and capped how large a model Microsoft could train, measured in FLOPS. Suleyman called that cap a big limitation for a company of Microsoft's scale. Suleyman announced the formation of the MAI Superintelligence Team to work toward "Humanist Superintelligence" (HSI), defined as incredibly advanced AI capabilities that always work for people and humanity. Several companies have rebranded advanced AI efforts toward superintelligence, including Meta and OpenAI.

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