Salesforce’s chief, Marc Benioff, recently had an interview on CNBC, where he discussed the potential cracks in Microsoft and OpenAI’s tie-up. The reason being, Microsoft’s latest acquisition of Mustafa Suleyman, which coincides with OpenAI’s endeavours to collaborate with Oracle and Softbank on a project labelled ‘Stargate’- worth a staggering $500 billion.
Benioff slyly noted, “Microsoft is busy crafting its unique AI, and OpenAI wouldn’t be a part of their plans in the long haul. Why? Because they’ve got Mustafa Suleyman on board. Furthermore, the animosity between Suleyman and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s executive, is no secret.”
He goes on to state that the end of their one-and-only partnership was inevitable. OpenAI received a whopping $1 billion from Microsoft back in 2019, years prior to OpenAI’s launch of their product, ChatGPT. Since then, OpenAI has made strides towards becoming its independent tech powerhouse, likely to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Microsoft someday.
Dissent between the two tech giants has been brewing since mid-2023, particularly after the launch of OpenAI’s competitive enterprise solution. As per some sources, collaboration between employees of the two companies is not smooth sailing, with a clear line of superiority drawn by OpenAI.
Close on the heels of this, Satya Nadella appointed DeepMind and Inflection’s co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman as the leader of Microsft’s AI wing. This accelerated the speculations about the expanding chasm in their partnership.
Unsurprisingly, this development has Benioff grinning from ear to ear, as Salesforce is also a user of OpenAI’s enterprise models and holds investments in OpenAI’s competitor, Anthropic.
Nonetheless, Benioff’s predictions about Suleyman’s discontent with Altman’s vision around AGI cannot be dismissed. In a recent interview with The Verge, Suleyman confessed that the OpenAI partnership was marked by “little tensions here and there.”
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