Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it will cost 'hundreds of billions' to keep up with frontier AI in the next decade

"it's going to cost "hundreds of billions of dollars" to compete at the frontier of AI over the next five to 10 years. "Not to mention the prices that we're paying for individual researchers or members of technical staff," he added. Suleyman compared Microsoft to a "modern construction company," where hundreds of thousands of workers are 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."

"Microsoft, which has a market capitalization of $3.54 trillion, brought in $77.7 billion in revenue for the quarter ending in September, surpassing analysts' estimates. 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."

Developing and maintaining frontier AI capabilities will require investments of hundreds of billions of dollars over the next five to ten years. Large-scale deployment demands vast numbers of CPUs, specialized AI accelerators, and high-cost technical staff. Big technology companies have structural advantages due to scale, workforce, and capital, enabling self-sufficiency in building frontier models. Objectives include assembling world-class superintelligence teams focused on both performance and safety and pursuing humanist, aligned superintelligence. High costs and uncertainty about a possible intelligence explosion create ambiguity around startup competitiveness and contribute to frothy market valuations.

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