‘Microsoft and OpenAI Broke Up — Now They’re Ready to Fight’

Hayden Field and Tom Warren, writing for The Verge (gift link): This year’s Build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcée posting a thirst trap on Instagram. “It’s always fun to be at developer conferences in times of great change,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said onstage Tuesday, adding that events like this are about “coming to grips with the new opportunity.” AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, in an interview with The Verge, put it even more bluntly. “The goal is to prove that we can become one of the top four labs in the world,” Suleyman said. “There’s three labs that matter, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We are not one of them at the moment, and that’s always been my intention. It’s why I came here. I want to build the very best frontier models in the world, fully multimodal, and in order to do that, we have to prove that we can do everything that we need to from the ground up, and we’re not just going to take from others.” Refreshingly blunt. But hasn’t that been Microsoft’s plan for Bing since it was announced in 2009? I mean I guess you can say that Bing is one of the top four search engines in the world. Maybe you can even say it’s one of the top two. But it’s irrelevant and uncompetitive with Google Search. ★