January 23rd, inWorld Economic Forum in Davossuperior,Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, in an interview with CNBC, talks about theMicrosoftand OpenAI Couldn't help but laugh at the emerging rift between the
Recently, OpenAI plans to partner with SoftBank and Oracle to launch a $500 billion (note: currently about 3.64 trillion yuan) data center project called Stargate, and Microsoft will no longer be OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider.
I think it's important for OpenAI to move quickly to other platforms," Benioff predicted.Because Microsoft is developing its own AI technology, it may not be relying on OpenAI in the future. They'll have their own frontier model." He added with a laugh, "That's why they hired Mustafa Suleyman. And Suleyman and Sam Altman (Sam Altman) are not good friends."
Benioff mentioned that the discord between the two men was evident as far back as the Davos forum a year ago, "when Sam and Mustafa shared the same stage for a discussion, but apparently didn't get along."
In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, well before the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Today, OpenAI appears to be on its way to tech giant status, and may even be able to separate itself from Microsoft in the future.OpenAI has also blamed product delays on a lack of compute resources, suggesting that it may have needed more data center capacity than Microsoft was able (or willing) to provide. In addition, OpenAI's exclusive agreement with Microsoft states that theThe agreement will terminate once OpenAI achieves mutually agreed upon Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).. And according to Altman, the realization of AGI is just around the corner.
Some reports indicate that tensions between the two companies have been rising since at least mid-2023, when OpenAI released its own enterprise product to compete with Microsoft, and in late 2023, when Altman was fired and then reinstated as OpenAI's CEO, employees from both companies revealed to Business Insider that they didn't like working together. Some said OpenAI employees tended to look down on Microsoft employees.
A few short months later, at the beginning of 2024, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella "returned the favor,"Hired Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection, to lead Microsoft's AI division.
Despite reports that Microsoft is working on its own large-scale language model, MAI-1, earlier this month Microsoft announced the formation of a new AI team led by Jay Parikh to focus on developing AI agents and applications, and the announcement didn't even mention OpenAI.
The crack in Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI is good news for Benioff; Salesforce also uses OpenAI's enterprise models and is an investor in OpenAI competitor Anthropic.
It's worth noting that Suleiman has always been skeptical of Altman's vision, especially when it comes to AGI. Last month, he admitted in an interview with The Verge thatThe partnership with OpenAI "has had a few hiccups from time to time".