Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman says he loves Sam Altman and believes he is sincere about AI security

In an interview Tuesday on the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, made it clear that he admires OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin he asked what the plan can be when Microsoft’s vast AI future wasn’t so closely depending on OpenAI, using the metaphor of winning a cycling race. But Suleiman dodged it.

“I don’t buy the metaphor that there is a finish line. This is another false frame,” he said. “We have to stop seeing everything as a close race.”

He then toed Microsoft’s corporate stance on his company’s take care of OpenAI, wherein the corporate reportedly invested $10 billion through a mix of money and cloud credits. The deal gives Microsoft a big share of OpenAI’s industrial business and enables it to embed artificial intelligence models into Microsoft products and sell the technology to Microsoft’s cloud customers. Some reports indicate that Microsoft may you may even be eligible for some OpenAI payments.

“It’s true that we have fierce competition with them,” Suleyman said of OpenAI. “It’s an independent company. We don’t own or control them. We don’t even have board members. So they do their very own thing. But we share a deep partnership. I’m a excellent friend of Sam’s and I actually have numerous respect for them and trust and imagine in what they’ve done. And this is what it would seem like for a lot of, a few years,” Suleyman said.

It is essential for Suleiman to profess this close/distant relationship. Microsoft investors and corporate customers appreciate the close relationship. However, regulatory authorities became concerned about April as well The EU agreed that its investment was not a real takeover. If this changes, regulatory involvement will probably change as well.

Suleyman says he trusts Altman with AI security

In a way, Suleyman was the Sam Altman of AI before OpenAI. He has spent most of his profession competing with OpenAI and is known for his ego.

Suleyman was the founding father of DeepMind, a man-made intelligence pioneer, and sold it to Google in 2014. He was reportedly placed on administrative leave following allegations of worker mistreatment, as reported by Bloomberg in 2019and then moved on to other roles at Google before leaving the corporate in 2022 to hitch Greylock Partners as a enterprise partner. A number of months later, he and Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, a Microsoft board member, launched Inflection AI to construct their very own LLM chatbot, amongst other goals.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tried to rent Sam Altman last fall, but was unsuccessful when OpenAI fired him and then quickly reinstated him. Then in March, Microsoft hired Suleyman and most of Inflection, leaving a skeleton company and an enormous paycheck. In his recent position at Microsoft, Suleyman audited the OpenAI code, Semafor reported the case earlier this month. As one among OpenAI’s previous major rivals, it might now delve deeper into its crown jewel rival.

There is one other wrinkle to all this. OpenAI was founded with the goal of conducting AI safety research to stop a one-day evil AI from destroying humanity. In 2023, while Suleyman was still a competitor to OpenAI, he published a book with researcher Michael Bhaskar titled “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma”. The book discusses the threats related to artificial intelligence and methods to prevent them.

A bunch of former OpenAI employees signed the letter earlier this month, outlining his concerns that OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms should not taking security seriously enough.

When asked about this, Suleiman also revealed that he had love and trust for Altman, but additionally that he wanted each regulation and a slower pace.

“Maybe it’s because I’m British with European leanings, but I’m not afraid of regulation in the way that everyone seems to be,” he said, describing all of the finger-pointing by former employees as “healthy dialogue.” He added: “I think it’s a great thing that technologists, entrepreneurs and CEOs of companies like myself and Sam, who I love very much and think are amazing,” are talking about regulation. “He’s not cynical, he’s genuine. He really believes in it.”

But he also said, “Friction can be our friend here. These technologies have gotten so powerful, can be so intimate, can be so ubiquitous, that it is time to take stock. If all this dialog slows AI development by six to 18 months or more, “it’s time well spent.”

Everything is very cozy between these players.

Suleyman wants cooperation with China, AI in classrooms

Suleiman also made interesting remarks on other issues. About the AI ​​race with China:

“With all due respect to my good friends in DC and the military-industrial complex, if the default assumption is that this can only be a new Cold War, then that’s exactly what it will be, because it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They will be afraid that we are afraid that we will be hostile, so they must be hostile, and this will only escalate,” he said. “We need to find ways to work together, show them respect, while recognizing that we have a different set of values.”

On the opposite hand, he also said that China is “constructing its own technology ecosystem and spreading it around the globe. We really should pay close attention to this.

When asked about his opinion on children using artificial intelligence in class work, Suleiman, who replied that he had no children, shrugged. “I feel we’ve to be a bit of cautious about the shortcomings of any tool, you understand, similar to when calculators got here out, it was type of an instinctive response of, oh no, everyone will give you the chance to type of solve all of the equation problems immediately. And that may make us dumber because we couldn’t do mental arithmetic.

He also predicts that there’ll soon be a time when AI will act as a teacher’s aide, perhaps talking live within the classroom because the AI’s verbal skills improve. “What would it look like if a great teacher or educator had a deep conversation with artificial intelligence that was live and in front of an audience?”

The lesson here is that if we wish the individuals who create and profit from artificial intelligence to control humanity and protect it from its worst effects, we could also be setting unrealistic expectations.