Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff literally laughed when he spoke to CNBC from Davos about the new rift in Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. As part of OpenAI’s plan to partner with SoftBank and Oracle on a $500 billion data center project called Stargate, Microsoft is no longer OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider.
“I think it’s really important that OpenAI scales quickly to other platforms because Microsoft is building their own AI and I don’t think Microsoft will use OpenAI in the future. They’ll have a Frontier model,” Benioff predicted with a laugh. “That’s why they hired Mustafa Suleiman. And Mustafa Suleiman and Sam Altman are not best friends.”
Benioff said their animosity was evident a year ago at Davos, when “Sam and Mustafa were on a panel together and they didn’t get along.”
The end of Microsoft’s exclusive hosting of OpenAI was doomed. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, several years before OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Today, OpenAI has established itself as a technology giant in its own right, perhaps one day rivaling Microsoft. OpenAI also claims that a lack of available compute is responsible for the product delay, indicating that it needs more data center capacity than Microsoft can (or perhaps wants) to provide. And the exclusive agreement between OpenAI and Microsoft was supposed to end whenever OpenAI achieved the mutually agreed upon AGI.
According to some reports, tensions between the two companies have been rising since at least mid-2023, after OpenAI released its own competing enterprise product. After Altman was fired and returned as OpenAI’s CEO at the end of 2023, employees at both companies told Business Insider they really didn’t like working together. OpenAI employees tend to look down on Microsoft employees, some employees said.
Just a few months later, in early 2024, Nadella thumbed his nose by hiring DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead Microsoft AI. (Microsoft has not yet responded to a request for comment.)
Benioff may be hoping that Microsoft will abandon OpenAI altogether in the future, but that may be wishful thinking. However, Microsoft is reportedly working on its own LLM called MAI-1. Still, when Microsoft announced a new AI group led by Jay Parikh to develop AI agents and apps earlier this month, it didn’t even mention OpenAI in its post.
The latest rift in this partnership is good news for Benioff. Salesforce also uses OpenAI’s enterprise model and has also invested in OpenAI rival Anthropic.
Still, Benioff’s observations about Suleiman are not entirely off-base. Suleiman is known for rejecting Altman’s vision, especially when it comes to AGI, and admitted in an interview with The Verge last month that there was “little tension in places” in the OpenAI partnership.
TechCrunch has a newsletter focused on AI. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox every Wednesday.