His comments come as other tech leaders have spoken about the staggering cost of chasing AGI. Mustafa Suleyman has estimated that staying competitive in frontier AI development will require “hundreds of billions of dollars” over the next five to ten years, a sum that doesn’t even account for the high salaries companies are paying individual researchers and technical staff.
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Microsoft a ‘modern construction company’, says Mustafa Suleyman
Mustafa Suleyman also compared tech giant Microsoft to a “modern construction company” where hundreds of thousands of workers are fully dedicated in building gigawatts of CPUs and AI accelerators. The scale of investment that is required is huge, and “clearly there’s a structural advantage by being inside a big company,” he said.
Suleyman said his mission is to make Microsoft “self-sufficient” in developing its frontier models and to build “an absolutely world-class superintelligence team.” “We’re absolutely pushing for the frontier,” Suleyman said. “We want to build the best superintelligence and the safest superintelligence models in the world.” Suleyman said last month that his team is “trying to build a humanist superintelligence” — one that is aligned with human interest.
“The ambiguity is what’s driving the frothiness of the valuations,” he said. “If suddenly we do have an intelligence explosion, then lots of people can get there simultaneously.”
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Microsoft, Meta spending millions on hiring AI talent
Microsoft is one of the several tech companies chasing artificial general intelligence (AGI) and other tech giants are locked in an intense and tough ‘AI talent war’. From Meta to Google to Microsoft, many big tech firms are offering enormous salaries to poach top researchers. Earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched an aggressive and costly hiring push for the company’s AI Superintelligence Labs, including the recruitment of Scale AI co-founder Alexander Wang as part of a $14 billion investment. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also revealed that Zuckerberg attempted to lure OpenAI employees with signing bonuses of up to $100 million, along with even larger compensation offers.
On the other hand, Google secured Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of AI coding startup Windsurf, to join the tech company DeepMind in a deal valued at $2.4 billion. Microsoft AI has quietly hired around two dozen employees from Google DeepMind as part of the escalating battle to dominate the multibillion-dollar AI market.
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AGI refers to AI systems capable of performing most tasks at human-level intelligence, while superintelligence describes systems that surpass human capabilities. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in September he’d rather risk “misspending a couple of hundred billion” than fall behind in superintelligence.
At the same time, big tech firms are pouring billions of dollars into building AI data centres. In recent months, companies including Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon have significantly ramped up spending on the computing infrastructure and technology required to develop and run advanced AI models.