Mustafa Suleiman, CEO of Microsoft AI, said at the company’s all-hands meeting on Thursday that Microsoft plans to make “significant investments” in its AI chip cluster to achieve “self-sufficiency in AI.”
Despite some distance between Microsoft and OpenAI, Microsoft’s AI strategy has so far largely relied on its partnership with OpenAI. Suleiman’s comments indicate that Microsoft wants to forge its own path in AI while continuing to support OpenAI through cloud computing services.
Suleiman said: “For a company as large and diverse as ours, it is crucial that we can achieve self-sufficiency in AI if we choose to.”
Suleiman stated that Microsoft is no longer solely dependent on OpenAI, but is using open-source models, collaborating with other AI developers, and building its own models.
Microsoft released MAI-1-preview in late August. It’s the first foundational model trained entirely from scratch by Microsoft AI, offering a glimpse into future products for its Copilot services. On the LMArena leaderboard, the model ranks 24th among text models, and Microsoft still has a lot of work to do.
Suleiman said: “We should have the capability to build state-of-the-art, frontier models of all sizes internally, but we should also be very pragmatic and use other models when needed.”