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Microsoft ( MSFT ) forms MAI Superintelligence Team starting with

AI for

medical diagnostics

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Company to invest heavily on effort targeting specialist

AI

models

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Microsoft AI chief predicts 'medical superintelligence'

for

diagnosis in 2-3 years

By Jeffrey Dastin

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Microsoft ( MSFT ) is forming a

new team that wants to build artificial intelligence that is

vastly more capable than humans in certain domains, starting

with medical diagnostics, the executive leading the effort told

Reuters.

Called the MAI Superintelligence Team, the project follows

similar efforts by Meta Platforms, Safe Superintelligence Inc

and others that have begun targeting technical leaps while

garnering skepticism for their ability to deliver, absent new

breakthroughs.

Microsoft ( MSFT ) plans to invest "a lot of money" on the

project as well, said Mustafa Suleyman, the AI chief in charge.

Meta this year offered $100 million signing bonuses to recruit

famous AI talent. Suleyman declined to say if such offers or

poaching attempts were on the table. However, he said Microsoft

AI would continue to recruit from other top labs while staffing

its new team with existing researchers and Karen Simonyan as

chief scientist.

Microsoft's ( MSFT ) effort comes with a twist. According to

Suleyman, the company is not chasing "infinitely capable

generalist" AI like some peers. The reason, he said, is he

doubts that autonomous, self-improving machines could be

controlled, despite research into how humanity might keep AI in

check.

He said Microsoft ( MSFT ) has a vision for "humanist

superintelligence," or technology that could solve defined

problems with a real-world benefit.

"Humanism requires us to always ask the question: does this

technology serve human interests?" said Suleyman.

AI theorists and developers have long debated whether the

technology may lead to imminent danger or poses no harm relative

to problems such as machine-learned bias and trustworthiness.

Suleyman said he aims to focus the Microsoft ( MSFT ) team on

specialist models that achieve what he called superhuman

performance while posing "virtually no existential risk

whatsoever." He gave as examples AI that solves battery storage

or develops molecules, in a nod to AlphaFold, DeepMind's AI

models that can predict protein structures. Suleyman was a

DeepMind co-founder.

Suleyman said that for diagnosis, a domain long of interest to

the AI field and one that Microsoft ( MSFT ) has focused on, the company

has a "line of sight to medical superintelligence in the next

two to three years."

He said the effort is based on AI that reasons through

problems and still would require breakthroughs. But if achieved,

he said the AI would "increase our life expectancy and give

everybody more healthy years, because we'll be able to detect

preventable diseases much earlier."