Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job

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**Nilay Patel** (1:43)
Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, and I'm actually going to keep this intro pretty short. First, if you're watching the video, you can tell that I'm working from the basement of my wife's family farm. But second, and way more importantly, it's a real burner of an episode. Mustafa and I covered everything from his approach to training new models to his deep criticisms of Anthropic talking about Claude as though it's conscious. Of course, we also talked about all of the AI announcements Microsoft just made it build its development confidence, the company's relationship with OpenAI, which is very different than it used to be, and the cultural and political pushback to AI across the country. I really wanted to know how Mustafa was thinking about it, and whether any of the consumer AI products available today are enough to overcome those objections. Like I said, this one's a burn, and Mustafa was down to talk about all of it.
Mustafa Cylinder, CEO of Microsoft AI. Here we go.
Mustafa Suleyman, you are the CEO of Microsoft AI. Welcome back to Decoder.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (2:54)
Nilay, great to be with you again.

**Nilay Patel** (2:56)
Yeah, I'm very excited to talk to you. I think our previous conversation, one of my favorite conversations about AI and how it should make us feel and what it's for that I've had in all the conversations about AI that we've had, there are some big changes at Microsoft, maybe some very important recontextualization about how people feel about AI that I want to talk to you about in particular. And then there's Microsoft Build, the big Microsoft's big developer conference, lots of new announcements, lots of big ideas about what computers are for and maybe where they should be that I want to get into.
Let's start at the very start. This is some deep Decoder stuff that is important to understand before all the rest of it.
Since you joined Microsoft, you have restructured how AI works there, your role has changed. The last time I talked to you, you were in charge of a bunch of consumer products that has been since set aside. You're now training new models, you're on the frontier. Explain how Microsoft AI is structured now and how it's structured inside Microsoft.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (3:53)
Yeah, so I guess the last 15 to 18 months or so, we've been on this journey to reestablish our relationship with OpenAI. It's taken a minute. I think it culminated in a new contract that we got done finally in October of last year.
There were lots and lots of different provisions in that, including cement and extending the partnership. But crucially, freeing us up to be able to pursue superintelligence independently, as well as keep buying and licensing their models. Since October, I've been assembling the superintelligence team, building clusters of sufficient scale to train frontier models, hiring a team focused on superintelligence. That was quite a big shift for us because it enabled me to focus just on the superintelligence mission, and that has then culminated in a few things that we announced this week at Build. We have seven new models across all the modalities and so on. So it's been a pretty big shift and I think a long time in the planning and a great relief for us to now be in the game and pursuing the absolute frontier over the next few years.