Microsoft’s AI chief says superintelligence is near, but won’t take your job

Today I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. And I’m actually going to keep today’s intro short — I’m working from my wife’s family farm this week, as you’ll see in the video, but also this is a real burner of an episode. We covered everything from Mustafa’s approach to training new models to his criticisms of Anthropic talking about Claude as though it is conscious. Of course, we also talked about Microsoft’s relationship with Open AI, how Mustafa is thinking about all the negative polling and political pushback around AI right now, and whether any of the consumer products are good enough to overcome it. Like I said, it’s a burner. Okay: Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Mustafa Suleyman, you are the CEO of Microsoft AI. Welcome back to Decoder. Great to be with you again. I’m very excited to talk to you. Our previous conversation was one of my favorite conversations — about AI, how it should make us feel, and what it’s for — that I’ve had in all the conversations 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 developer conference, which featured lots of new announcements and 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 since been 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 Microsof