Microsoft’s Next Big AI Bet: Building a ‘Humanist Superintelligence’

Microsoft is making its next monumental move in the artificial intelligence race by establishing the MAI Superintelligence Team, an ambitious new group dedicated to researching highly advanced forms of AI. This initiative will be spearheaded by Mustafa Suleyman, who leads Microsoft’s AI division (overseeing tools like Bing and Copilot), and the company is committing "a lot of money" to this research effort. Karen Simonyan joins the team as chief scientist.
Unlike rivals seeking to build an "infinitely capable generalist" AI, which Suleyman suggests may be difficult to control, Microsoft is focused on developing "humanist superintelligence". The core philosophy is to create a practical technology designed explicitly only to serve humanity. This approach requires the team to constantly ask: "does this technology serve human interests?". The objective is to solve "real, concrete problems" while ensuring the resulting technology remains "grounded and controllable". Microsoft is also setting clear limits, affirming: “We are not building a superintelligence at any cost, with no limits,”.
This new group aims to build useful AI companions to assist people across crucial sectors, with projects planned in education, renewable energy, and medicine. Suleyman believes these specialized systems will achieve “superhuman performance” without posing major risks. Examples of this specialized AI include technology that can improve battery storage or design new complex molecules.
A major focus is healthcare. Suleyman predicts that AI capable of offering expert-level diagnosis could emerge within the next two or three years. This medical superintelligence will deliver "expert-level performance at the full range of diagnostics, alongside highly capable planning and prediction" in clinical settings, and detect preventable diseases much earlier.
The formation of this team comes as Microsoft, despite holding a $135 billion stake in OpenAI and powering its tools via Azure, works to diversify its AI sources, experimenting with models from Anthropic and Google. Suleyman brings significant history to the project, having previously co-founded DeepMind and led Inflection, which Microsoft recently acquired.

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