A new team will focus on creating AI “designed solely to serve humanity.”
Microsoft AI wants you to know that its work toward superintelligence involves keeping humans "at the top of the food chain." In a lengthy blog post on Thursday, Microsoft AI leader Mustafa Suleyman highlighted the formation of a new team dedicated to developing a "humanistic superintelligence" that is "designed solely to serve humanity."
This type of superintelligence, according to Suleyman, will not be "a boundless, unrestricted entity with high degrees of autonomy," but rather "carefully calibrated, contextualized, and within limits." Suleyman joined Microsoft last year as CEO of Microsoft AI, which recently launched its first internal models for text, speech, and image generation.
Although Suleyman's blog post says that Microsoft AI will "reject narratives about a race to AGI," the competition between Microsoft and OpenAI is about to become much more intense. Under a new agreement with OpenAI, Microsoft can now "independently pursue AGI, either alone or in partnership with third parties." And, as my colleague Hayden Field pointed out, "Microsoft is perfectly within its legal rights to use OpenAI's intellectual property to develop its own AGI and try to win the race."
But Suleyman has a "humanistic" vision of superintelligence with three main applications, including serving as an AI companion that will help people "learn, act, be productive and feel supported," offering assistance in the health industry, and creating "new scientific breakthroughs" in clean energy.
“At Microsoft AI, we believe that humans matter more than AI,” Suleyman writes. “Humanistic superintelligence keeps us humans at the center of the picture. It’s an AI that’s on humanity’s team, a subordinate and controllable AI, one that won’t open, that can’t open, a Pandora’s Box.”
Original article by Emma Roth | theverge.com | November 6, 2025
