Microsoft Forms Superintelligence Team Under Mustafa Suleyman to Build 'Humanist AI'

Microsoft AI says it'll make superintelligent AI that won't be terrible for humanity

This kind of superintelligence, according to Suleyman, won't be "an unbounded and unlimited entity with high degrees of autonomy" and will instead be "carefully calibrated, contextualized, within limits." Suleyman joined Microsoft last year as the CEO of Microsoft AI, which has only recently launched its first in-house models for text, voice, and image generation. Though Suleyman's blog post says Microsoft AI will "reject narratives about a race to AGI," the competition between Microsoft and OpenAI is about to get much more intense. Under a new deal with OpenAI, Microsoft can now "independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties." And, as pointed out by my colleague Hayden Field, "Microsoft is perfectly within its legal rights to use OpenAI's IP to develop its own AGI and attempt to win the race."

Microsoft forms superintelligence team under AI chief Suleyman 'to serve humanity'

Microsoft on Thursday said it's forming a team that will be tasked with performing advanced artificial intelligence research. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of the Microsoft AI group that includes Bing and the Copilot assistant, announced the formation of the MAI Superintelligence Team, and said in a blog post that he'll be leading it. "We are doing this to solve real concrete problems and do it in such a way that it remains grounded and controllable," Suleyman wrote. "We are not building an ill-defined and ethereal superintelligence; we are building a practical technology explicitly designed only to serve humanity." The decision comes months after Facebook parent Meta spent billions to hire talent for its new Meta Superintelligence Labs unit that's working on research and products. The term superintelligence typically refers to machines deemed more intelligent than the smartest people. Suleyman was a co-founder of AI lab DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014. After leaving Google in 2022, he co-founded and led AI startup Inflection. Microsoft hired Suleyman and several other Inflection employees last year. Top technology companies have rushed to hire leading AI engineers and researchers, augmenting their products with generative AI capabilities. The boom started with OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Microsoft uses OpenAI models in Bing and Copilot, while OpenAI runs workloads in Microsoft's Azure cloud. Microsoft also owns a $135 billion equity stake in OpenAI following a restructuring. Microsoft has taken steps to reduce its dependence on OpenAI. After the Inflection deal, the software company also began drawing on models from Google and from Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI executives. The new Microsoft AI research group will focus on providing useful companions for people that can help in education and other domains, Suleyman wrote in his blog post. It will also pursue narrow areas in medicine and in renewable energy production. "We'll have expert level performance at the full range of diagnostics, alongside highly capable planning and prediction in operational clinical settings," Suleyman wrote. As investors and analysts are increasingly voicing their concerns about overspending on AI without a clear path to profits, Suleyman said he wants "to make clear that we are not building a superintelligence at any cost, with no limits."

Mustafa Suleyman leads Microsoft's new superintelligence moonshot

Why it matters: The move follows Microsoft's renegotiated deal with OpenAI and signals the company's intent to catch up in an expensive and crowded race to build artificial general intelligence. Zoom in: Suleyman will lead the Microsoft AI (MAI) Superintelligence team. * Karén Simonyan, Microsoft AI chief scientist, and other core MAI leaders and researchers will shift their focus to what Suleyman called "Humanist Superintelligence." * "We're definitely expanding the team and looking at folks with more fundamental research capabilities," Suleyman told Axios. Zoom out: AGI and superintelligence both refer broadly to AI systems that can equal or surpass human intelligence across a broad set of disciplines. Driving the news: Suleyman detailed the effort in an interview with Axios and a blog post Thursday, calling for Microsoft to build a highly powerful AI that's focused on serving humanity, as opposed to maximizing performance or other goals. * The software giant had been contractually prevented from pursuing artificial general intelligence under its prior deal with OpenAI, though the company has been developing smaller language models and algorithms for image and voice. What they're saying: "The project of superintelligence has to be about designing an AI which is subservient to humans, and one that keeps humans at the top of the food chain," Suleyman told Axios, noting that it's remarkable that such a statement even needs to be made. * "Humans matter more than AI," he writes in his blog. Yes, but: Suleyman rejects the narrative of the AI "race" to AGI. * He says results from the new Superintelligence Lab will take time and should be seen as "a wider and deeply human endeavor to improve our lives and future prospects." * "I think it's still going to be a good year or two before the superintelligence team is producing frontier models," he said in the interview. The big picture: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence are all pursuing similar ambitions, as are a variety of institutions in China. * Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said China is on track to win the AI race. Between the lines: Microsoft's focus on safety and human-centricity comes as the regulatory environment moves away from a focus on those areas. A key risk is that Microsoft's approach could prove costlier or less efficient than those developed with fewer safeguards.

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

When Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft in March 2024 to lead the company's new consumer AI unit -- home to products like Copilot -- there were clear limits to what he could do. 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." Most notably, Meta rebranded its AI efforts as Meta Superintelligence Labs in June 2025. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has written that his company has already figured out how to build artificial general intelligence, or AGI -- the idea of an AI system that is as capable as an individual human at most cognitive tasks -- and, even though it has yet to release an AI model that meets that initial goal, that it has begun to look beyond AGI to superintelligence. Meanwhile, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist, cofounded an AI startup called Safe Superintelligence that is also dedicated to creating this hypothetical superpowerful AI and making sure it remains controllable. He had previously led a similar effort within OpenAI. AI company Anthropic also has a team dedicated to researching how to control a hypothetical future superintelligence. Microsoft's framing of its own new superintelligence drive as "humanist superintelligence" is a deliberate effort to contrast it to the more technological goals of rivals like OpenAI and Meta[hotlink]. "We reject narratives about a race to AGI, and instead see it as part of a wider and deeply human endeavor to improve our lives and future prospects," Suleyman wrote in the blog post. "We also reject binaries of boom and doom; we're in this for the long haul to deliver tangible, specific, safe benefits for billions of people. We feel a deep responsibility to get this right." </p> <p>For the last year or so Microsoft AI has been on a journey to establish an AI "self-sufficiency effort," Suleyman told <em>Fortune, </em>while also seeking to <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/10/28/openai-for-profit-restructuring-microsoft-stake/">extend its OpenAI partnership</a> through 2030 so that it continues to get early access to OpenAI's best models and IP.</p> <p>Now, he explained, "we have a best-of-both environment, where we're free to pursue our own superintelligence and also work closely with them." </p> <p>That new self-sufficiency has required significant investments in AI chips for the team to train its models, though Suleyman declined to comment on the size of the team's GPU stash. But most of all, he said, the effort is about "making sure we have a culture in the team that is focused on developing the absolute frontier [of AI research]." It will take several years before the company is fully on that path, he acknowledged, but said that it's a "key priority" for Microsoft. </p> <p>Karén Simonyan will serve as the chief scientist of the new Humanist Superintelligence team. Simonyan joined Microsoft in the <a href="http://Why Microsoft's surprise deal with $4 billion startup Inflection is the most important non-acquisition in AI | Fortune ↗">same March 2024 deal</a> that brought Suleyman and a nunber of other key researchers from the AI startup he founded, Inflection, to the company. The team also includes several researchers that Microsoft had already poached from [hotlink]Google DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic. The new superintelligence effort, with its focus on keeping humanity at the forefront, does not mean that the company won't be innovating quickly, Suleyman insisted-even though at the same time he admitted that developing a "humanist" superintelligence would always involve being cautious about capabilities that are "not ready for prime time." When asked about how his viewpoints align with AI leaders in the Trump Administration, such as AI and crypto 'czar' David Sacks, who are pushing for no-holds-barred AI acceleration and less regulation, Suleyman said that, in many ways, Sacks is correct. "David's totally right, we should accelerate, it's critical for America, it's critical for the West in general," he said. However, he added, AI developers can push the envelope while also understanding potential risks like misinformation, social manipulation and autonomous systems that act outside of human intent. "We should be going as fast as possible within the constraints of making sure it doesn't harm us," he said.