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As part of Microsoft’s 50th-anniversary celebrations, it’s been talking a lot about its past but also its future and one doesn’t need a crystal ball to figure out what that will entail. According to the CEO of Microsoft’s AI division, we’re all going to be seeing a lot more of Copilot and, ultimately, digital companions powered by AI that will form a “lasting, meaningful relationship” with you.
This is all claimed by Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft’s AI section, and he expounded on what this would all be like in an interview with the Associated Press. “My goal is really to create a true personal AI companion. And the definition of AGI [artificial general intelligence] sort of feels very far out to me and sort of not what I’m focused on in the next few years.”
As to what he means by a ‘companion’, he explained by saying Microsoft’s AI technology will be “[o]ne that knows your name, gets to know you, has a memory of everything that you’ve shared with it and talked about and really comes to kind of live life alongside you,” he told AP. “It’s far more than just a piece of software or a tool. It is unlike anything we’ve really ever created.”
AI is already a big part of everything that Microsoft churns out these days, all wrapped up under the moniker of Copilot. From Office to Notepad, full operating systems to Surface laptops, the chatbot-on-steroids is ever-present but at least one never has to interact with it.
I’m not suggesting for one moment that some aspects of the integration of Copilot aren’t useful—for the right user, the features provide a variety of shortcuts to boost productivity or gain better insights into what you’re doing. Like all software tools, it can be very useful or very useless. However, it’s clear that Suleyman envisages something rather different for the future of Microsoft’s AI.
And we’re not just talking about things in the far future. Some of this will start to roll out relatively soon, starting with Microsoft’s mobile applications, which will gain some kind of ‘visual memory capability’ that sounds very much like the much-delayed Recall.
Suleyman is no recent convert to the world of AI. Nearly 25 years ago, he co-founded and led DeepMind, a UK-based AI company that would ultimately be snapped up by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in 2014. DeepMind is famous for creating AlphaGo, an AI system that could give some professional Go masters a run for their money.
After leaving Google in 2022, Suleyman went on to start up another artificial intelligence company, Inflection AI, before eventually joining Microsoft as the executive vice president and chief executive officer of its AI division in 2024. While clearly a big fan of AI and what it can do for us, he’s also been a vocal proponent for the enforcement of AI ethics and the like. However, he’s also well known for having the view that pretty much anything on the Internet is fair game to be used for AI training, which rather flies in the face of copyright laws.
While attending this year’s Game Developer Conference, I saw an awful lot of stands, press talks, and lectures on AI in games and gaming. Artificial NPCs, artificial gaming buddies, artificial advice, artificial rendering—AI couldn’t be escaped. We might not see Suleyman’s vision of an overly-attached AI companion anytime soon but given how much money Microsoft and the rest of the tech world are spending on all of this right now, you can be sure that it will happen.
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Kurt Indovina
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