Rival Marc Benioff says Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI soured when it hired Mustafa Suleiman.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was literally laughing as he spoke From Davos to CNBC About new cracks in Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. As part of OpenAI’s plans to work with SoftBank and Oracle on a $500 billion data center project called Stargate, Microsoft is no longer the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI.

“I think it’s extremely important that OpenAI moves quickly to other platforms because Microsoft is building its own AI, and I don’t think Microsoft will use OpenAI in the future. They’re going to have their own frontier models,” Benioff predicted with a laugh. “That’s why they hired Mustafa Suleyman. Mustafa Suleyman and Sam Altman are not the best of friends.”

Benioff said their dislike surfaced at the Davos show a year ago, “Sam and Mustafa were on panels together and they weren’t getting along.”

Only Microsoft hosting OpenAI would come to an end. Microsoft has invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 — years before OpenAI releases ChatGPT in late 2022. Now, OpenAI seems to be about its status as a tech giant, perhaps one day rivaling Microsoft. There is also OpenAI blamed the lack of an available estimate for product delays suggests it needs more data center capacity than Microsoft can (or perhaps wants) to provide. OpenAI’s exclusivity agreement with Microsoft was supposed to end no matter what OpenAI achieved both admitted to having AGI. To hear Sam Altman say, AGI is now possible.

Some reports suggest that tensions between the two companies have existed since at least mid-2023, after the release of OpenAI itself. competing enterprise product. After Altman was fired and Reinstated as CEO of OpenAI At the end of 2023, employees of both companies said Business Insider they really don’t like working together. According to some employees, OpenAI employees tend to look down on those at Microsoft.

Just a few months later, in early 2024, Nadella pulled the plug, hiring DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleiman to lead Microsoft AI. (Microsoft has not yet responded to our request for comment.)

While Benioff hopes that Microsoft will abandon OpenAI entirely in the future, this may be wishful thinking, although Microsoft reported He is working on his own LLM called MAI-1. Again, Microsoft announced the article didn’t even mention OpenAI, a new AI group led by Jay Parikh that will build AI agents and applications earlier this month.

This latest rift in the partnership is good news for Benioff. Also Salesforce It uses OpenAI’s enterprise modelsand does investor Competitor Anthropic on OpenAI.

However, Benioff’s observations about Solomon are not entirely contradictory. Suleiman is known to reject Altman’s vision, especially around AGI, and admitted it in an interview last month. The Verge that the OpenAI partnership has “little tensions here and there”.