“For a company of our scale, that’s a big limitation,” Suleyman told Fortune.
That’s all changing now: Suleyman announced the formation of the new MAI Superintelligence Team on Thursday. Led by Suleyman and part of the broader Microsoft AI business, the team will work towards “Humanist Superintelligence (HSI),” which Suleyman defined in a blog post as “incredibly advanced AI capabilities that always work for, in service of, people and humanity more generally.”
The new superintelligence effort, with its focus on keeping humanity at the forefront, does not mean that the company won’t be innovating quickly, Suleyman insisted–even though at the same time he admitted that developing a “humanist” superintelligence would always involve being cautious about capabilities that are “not ready for prime time.”
“David’s totally right, we should accelerate, it’s critical for America, it’s critical for the West in general,” he said. However, he added, AI developers can push the envelope while also understanding potential risks like misinformation, social manipulation and autonomous systems that act outside of human intent.
“We should be going as fast as possible within the constraints of making sure it doesn’t harm us,” he said.
