Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman has warned that the odds of existential doom are “nearly absolute” — the company could walk away from AI if risks escalate

In March 2024, DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft to lead its AI division, focusing on advancing Copilot and other consumer AI products and research.

Microsoft has been heavily invested in the generative AI landscape, especially after making a $1 billion investment in OpenAI back in 2019. Since then, the AI firm has remained closely aligned with Microsoft, despite Bill Gates initially discouraging CEO Satya Nadella from investing. "You're going to burn this billion dollars," Gates warned.

Investors have raised concerns about defining a clear profitability path in the ever-evolving sector amid billion-dollar investments. More recently, a damniing report suggested that Microsoft's internal AI efforts aren't paying off, prompting the company to cut sales goals for its Azure AI products across the board. The report further detailed that virtually nobody is using Microsoft's AI products.

Microsoft and OpenAI renewed their vows under a new definitive agreement after months of tension and pressure from investors to evolve into a for-profit venture. As part of the new arrangement, Microsoft is now free to pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI) independently or with third parties. Additionally, OpenAI can't prematurely declare AGI to sever its ties with Microsoft unless an independent expert panel verifies the claim.

It now appears the company may slow AI development if it comes at humanity’s expense. During a recent interview on Bloomberg’s The Mishal Husain Show, Suleyman indicated:

“We won’t continue to develop a system that has the potential to run away from us. And yet, I think it’s kind of a novel position in the industry at the moment."

Microsoft has made significant headway in the AI space with Mustafa Suleyman at the forefront, pushing for humanist superintelligence. The executive has been promoting the development of AI systems strictly designed to serve humans.

"Microsoft needs to be self-sufficient in AI," Microsoft's AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman. "And to do that, we have to train frontier models of all scales with our own data and compute at the state-of-the-art level."

Prior to the new definitive agreement with OpenAI, Microsoft had essentially foregone chasing AGI and superintelligence to access the firm's flagship technologies.

Microsoft, Suleyman said, had essentially forfeited those rights in exchange for access to OpenAI’s latest products, one element of a partnership that had the company building and fitting out data centers on OpenAI’s behalf for years.

Interestingly, the executive took a neutral stance on its competitors' efforts in the AI landscape. “Everybody has to decide what they stand for and how they operate, and I don’t want to judge how they’re operating right now,” Suleyman added.

Even as Microsoft moves forward with its plans to evolve Copilot into a real-friend companion that ages, the executive admits that the chatbot can make mistakes sometimes and that it's still in development.

This news comes amid multiple reports in the past claiming that there's a high probability the tech could lead to existential doom. AI safety researcher and director of the Cyber Security Laboratory at the University of Louisville, Roman Yampolskiy, previously indicated that there's a 99.999999% probability AI will end humanity, according to the p(doom) scale.

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