Microsoft is an AGI skeptic, but is there tension with OpenAI?

Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT over two years ago, it has retained its position as one of the frontrunners in the AI race, constantly developing smarter models and spin-off products. The company has no intention of slowing down, with its ultimate goal being to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or AI with autonomous, human-level intelligence.  

“Our mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a blog post last month. “In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together.” 

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However, OpenAI’s biggest strategic partner, Microsoft, has taken a different approach. In a recent interview, CEO Satya Nadella shared that the company is not working on the long-term goal of achieving AGI because it believes AGI to be overhyped. With a long-standing partnership and Microsoft investing billions in OpenAI, it raises the question: how are the two still managing to work together?

In an SXSW panel titled “Building Trustworthy AI: Evolving Safety Practices for GenAI,” Microsoft CPO of Responsible AI Sarah Bird shed light on the companies’ dynamics. Despite the deviating approaches, she shared that there was no “tension.”

“You think there would be sort of tension between those two, but in practice, it doesn’t seem to materialize that way,” said Bird. 

Rather, Bird finds that this ambitious goal pushes OpenAI to “dream big” and develop the net new capability that the world has never seen instead of making incremental upgrades. According to Bird, this drive and focus are needed for meaningful AI development.

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Microsoft’s decision not to pursue AGI is rooted in the company’s desire to have its AI offerings work with people instead of replacing them entirely. A prime example is Microsoft’s Copilot, positioned as an “AI companion” that assists users across all of the major Microsoft offerings, including the Microsoft 365 suite of applications and Github. 

“For me, [AGI] is a non-goal, and that’s true for Microsoft as well. We have a lot of humans, which is pretty cool, so I would rather have a technology that augments human capabilities and does the things that humans either aren’t great at or humans don’t want to do,” said Bird.