Microsoft pursues superintelligence after signing deal with OpenAI

Microsoft is developing a more powerful AI called “superintelligence,” which it hopes will lead to advances in fields such as medicine and materials science.

Mustafa Suleiman, head of Microsoft’s AI group, will lead what the company is calling the MAI Superintelligence team. The team is targeting hypothetical milestones even more ambitious than artificial general intelligence. This is a nebulous term that companies like OpenAI use to describe systems that can demonstrate human-level performance. Previously, Microsoft agreed not to pursue AGI as part of its partnership with OpenAI.

“If AGI is often seen as the point at which AI matches human performance in any task, superintelligence is the ability to far exceed that performance,” Suleiman said in a blog post announcing the push, which he said would join the personal AI family and lead to breakthroughs in health care and clean energy.

The team aims to build what he calls a “humanist superintelligence” that avoids the potential risks associated with developing powerful automation tools and works for the benefit of people rather than technological milestones.

Companies such as OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc. are also increasingly focusing on superintelligence as a new goal for AI development. The term “superintelligence” is as imprecise as AGI. It is unclear exactly how capable an AI needs to be at a particular task before it crosses the threshold from “general” to “super” intelligence.

The announcement follows a renegotiated agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI that determines the software maker’s stake in startups and changes some aspects of the relationship between the two companies. This included lifting an earlier ban on Microsoft developing advanced AI tools, which had limited much of the Redmond, Wash.-based company’s work to smaller, less comprehensive models than those that power ChatGPT.

Thursday’s announcement formalized a project that has been laying the groundwork since Microsoft hired Suleiman last March and licensed the intellectual property of his startup, Inflection AI.

Combining a reorganized Microsoft team and new hires, Suleiman has set out to build a new family of Microsoft AI models, which so far remains far smaller than OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google’s most capable offerings.

Suleiman told employees in September that Microsoft would make “significant investments” to expand the capabilities of these models.

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