Microsoft shifts AI focus off Sam Altman

• Brad Smith, the company's president, told Axios that Microsoft can't win at AI alone — heralding a "big change" by pivoting towards support for open source developers.
• OpenAI and Google now build mostly closed AI models, while Meta touts its open source model.
• Smith also told Axios that big tech's money will be essential to provide the "fundamental infrastructure for AI to advance."

Driving the news: Smith announced a "strategic partnership" with Mistral, a French open source AI model developer, making its models available to Microsoft's Azure cloud customers.

• Smith described Mistral as a standard-bearer for the rise of "important AI models outside the United States."

The intrigue: Microsoft is keen to move the AI focus beyond Sam Altman.

• "I think Sam is brilliant," Smith said, "but just as the printing press quickly evolved beyond Gutenberg, AI is quickly evolving beyond any single individual."

By the numbers: Microsoft now offers 1500 open source models out of around 1600 "models as a service" available through Microsoft Azure cloud.

• "We're on a path to spend somewhere in the ballpark of $50 billion this year (on AI), compared to the Chips Act, which is $52 billion over five years," Smith said, while rejecting the idea that the world needs $7 trillion of AI infrastructure in coming years, a reported fundraising target of Altman's.

Between the lines: Microsoft wants regulators to view the AI economy through a wide lens — and to see its OpenAI investment as a fraction of its overall AI spending.

• Microsoft defines the AI economy as nine layers of technology, a complex web of partnerships, and a wide diversity of AI models — all of which would be hard to dominate in ways that raise antitrust concerns.

• But since Google runs a popular app store and "mobile platforms are the most popular gateway to consumers," Microsoft is hinting that Google could be the one company at risk of hurting AI competition — a suggestion DOJ prosecutors explored in court in 2023, and which Google denies.

The big picture: Before officials turned up the heat on platforms and social media companies, it was Microsoft that had spent two decades tangling with antitrust regulators.

• Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI and its contentious $69 billion Activision acquisition have put an unwelcome antitrust spotlight back on the company — jeopardizing Smith's nearly 20-year reputation effort in Washington and Brussels.

What they're saying: Smith said the new AI principles will make "our infrastructure and services accessible, treating people fairly, and fulfilling societal responsibilities."

The bottom line: "If experience teaches us anything, it's that we'll all need to succeed together," Smith said.