Microsoft announced that it will invest in the development of a more advanced form of artificial intelligence, called “superintelligence”, with the potential to drive discoveries in areas such as medicine and materials science.
Mustafa Suleyman, head of Microsoft’s AI division, will lead the new MAI Superintelligence Team, which will pursue even more ambitious goals than so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term used by companies like OpenAI to describe systems capable of achieving human performance in various tasks. Previously, Microsoft had agreed not to develop AGI as part of its partnership with OpenAI.
“If AGI is seen as the point at which AI equals human performance in all tasks, superintelligence is when it goes far beyond that,” said Suleyman in a post published this Thursday. According to him, the project will seek to create AI-based personal assistants and promote advances in health and clean energy. The team aims to develop what it calls “humanistic superintelligence”, aimed at benefiting people and reducing risks associated with highly automated systems.
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Companies like OpenAI and Meta have also turned their efforts to superintelligence, a new milestone sought in the advancement of AI. Like the concept of AGI, the term is imprecise: there is still no consensus on the degree of capacity necessary for a system to overcome the limit between “general intelligence” and “superintelligence”.
Microsoft shares were down 1.4% at $500.01 at 10:35 a.m. (New York time).
The announcement comes after the renegotiation of the agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI, which redefined the software company’s participation in the startup and changed parts of the relationship between the two. The new understanding removed the previous prohibition that prevented Microsoft from developing advanced AI tools, which until then limited its projects to smaller and less powerful models than those used in ChatGPT.
The initiative formalizes work that had been structured since March, when Microsoft hired Suleyman and licensed the intellectual property of his startup, Inflection AI. With a combination of reorganized teams and new hires, he began developing a new family of Microsoft AI models — even less powerful than the most advanced systems from OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google.
In September, Suleyman told employees that Microsoft will make “significant investments” to expand the capabilities of these models.
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