Microsoft, freed from its reliance on OpenAI, is now chasing ‘superintelligence’—and AI chief Mustafa Suleyman wants to ensure it serves humanity

(Credit: Stephen Brashear—Getty Images)

When Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft in March 2024 to lead the company’s new consumer AI unit—home to products like Copilot—there were clear limits to what he could do.

Because of Microsoft’s landmark deal with OpenAI, the company was barred from pursuing its own AGI research. The agreement even capped how large a model Microsoft could train, restricting the company from building systems beyond a certain computing threshold. (This limit was measured in FLOPS, or the number of mathematical calculations an AI model performs per second. It is a rough approximation of the cumulative computing power used to train a model.)