Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was literally chuckling when talking to CNBC from Davos about the new rift in Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. As part of OpenAI’s plans to team up with SoftBank and Oracle on a $500 billion data center project called Stargate, Microsoft is no longer the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI.
“I think it’s extremely important that OpenAI gets to other platforms quickly because Microsoft is building their own AI and I don’t think Microsoft will use OpenAI in the future. They’ll have their own frontier models,” Benioff predicted, laughing. “That’s why they hired Mustafa Suleyman. And Mustafa Suleyman and Sam Altman are not best friends.”
Benioff said their dislike was visible at the year-ago Davos show, “where Sam and Mustafa were on panels together and not getting along.”
The end of Microsoft exclusively hosting OpenAI was destined to happen. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 — years before OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Now, OpenAI appears bound for its own tech giant status, perhaps one day to rival Microsoft. OpenAI has also blamed a lack of available compute for product delays, indicating it needs more data center capacity than Microsoft can (or perhaps wants to) provide. And OpenAI’s exclusive agreement with Microsoft was to end whenever OpenAI achieved what they both agreed was AGI. To hear Sam Altman tell it, AGI is possible now.
Some reports indicate tension between the two companies has been building since at least mid-2023, after OpenAI released its own, competing enterprise product. After Altman was fired and reinstated as OpenAI CEO in late 2023, employees from both companies told Business Insider they really don’t like working together. OpenAI’s folks tended to look down on those at Microsoft, some employees said.
Just a few months later, in early 2024, Nadella thumbed his nose back by hiring DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead Microsoft AI. (Microsoft has not yet responded to our request for comment.)
While Benioff may hope that Microsoft will fully abandon OpenAI in the future, that could be wishful thinking, although Microsoft is reportedly working on its own LLM called MAI-1. Still, when Microsoft announced earlier this month a new AI group led by Jay Parikh that will build AI agents and apps, the post didn’t even mention OpenAI.
This latest fissure in the partnership is good news for Benioff. Salesforce also uses OpenAI’s enterprise models, and is an investor in OpenAI rival Anthropic.
Even so, Benioff’s observations about Suleyman aren’t completely off. Suleyman has been known to dismiss Altman’s vision especially around AGI, and admitted last month in an interview with The Verge that the OpenAI partnership has “little tensions here and there.”
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