Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Published

3 weeks ago

April 5, 2025

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Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”

Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.

More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.

It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.

Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.

Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.

Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.

OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.

Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”

“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.

Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.

“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”

WATCH: Microsoft Copilot beginning of a seismic shift in AI integration, says Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman

Technology

Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers

Published

4 hours ago

April 29, 2025

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Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers

Uber on Monday informed employees, including some who had been previously approved for remote work, that it will require them to come to the office three days a week, CNBC has learned.

“Even as the external environment remains dynamic, we’re on solid footing, with a clear strategy and big plans,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “As we head into this next chapter, I want to emphasize that ‘good’ is not going to be good enough — we need to be great.”

Khosrowshahi goes on to say employees need to push themselves so the company “can move faster and take smarter risks” and outlined several changes to Uber’s work policy.

Uber in 2022 established Tuesdays and Thursdays as “anchor days” where most employees must spend at least half of their work time in the company’s office. Starting in June, employees will be required in the office Tuesday through Thursday, according to the memo.

That includes some employees who were previously approved to work remotely. The company said it had already informed impacted remote employees.

“After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”

The company also changed its one-month paid sabbatical program, according to the memo. Previously, employees were eligible for the sabbatical after five years at the company. That’s now been raised to eight years, according to the memo.

“This program was created when Uber was a much younger company, and when reaching 5 years of tenure was a rare feat,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “Back then, we were in the office five (sometimes more!) days of a week and hadn’t instituted our Work from Anywhere benefit.”

Khosrowshahi said the changes will help Uber move faster.

“Our collective view as a leadership team is that while remote work has some benefits, being in the office fuels collaboration, sparks creativity, and increases velocity,” Khosrowshahi wrote.

The changes come as more companies in the tech industry cut costs to appease investors after over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic. Google recently began demanding that employees who were previously-approved for remote work also return to the office if they want to keep their jobs, CNBC reported last week.

Last year, Khosrowshahi blamed remote work for the loss of its most loyal customers, who would take ride-sharing as their commute to work.

“Going forward, we’re further raising this bar,” Khosrowshahi’s Monday memo said. “After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office. In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”

Uber’s leadership team will monitor attendance “at both team and individual levels to ensure expectations are being met,” Khosrowshahi wrote.

Following the memo, Uber employees immediately swarmed the company’s internal question-and-answer forum, according to correspondence viewed by CNBC. Khosrowshahi said he and Nikki Krishnamurthy, the company’s chief people officer, will hold an all-hands meeting on Tuesday to discuss the changes.

Many employees asked leadership to reconsider the sabbatical change, arguing that the company should honor the original eligibility policy.

“This isn’t ‘doing the right thing’ for your employees,” one employee commented.

Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

WATCH: Lightning Round: Uber goes higher from here, says Jim Cramer

Technology

Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites in bid to take on Elon Musk’s Starlink

Published

10 hours ago

April 28, 2025

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Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites in bid to take on Elon Musk's Starlink

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is on the launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites, which are expected to eventually rival Elon Musk’s Starlink system, at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 9, 2025.

Steve Nesius | Reuters

Amazon on Monday launched the first batch of its Kuiper internet satellites into space after an earlier attempt was scrubbed due to inclement weather.

A United Launch Alliance rocket carrying 27 Kuiper satellites lifted off from a launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida shortly after 7 p.m. eastern, according to a livestream.

“We had a nice smooth countdown, beautiful weather, beautiful liftoff, and Atlas V is on its way to orbit to take those 27 Kuiper satellites, put them on their way and really start this new era in internet connectivity,” Caleb Weiss, a systems engineer at ULA, said on the livestream following the launch.

The satellites are expected to separate from the rocket roughly 280 miles above Earth’s surface, at which point Amazon will look to confirm the satellites can independently maneuver and communicate with its employees on the ground.

Six years ago Amazon unveiled its plans to build a constellation of internet-beaming satellites in low Earth orbit, called Project Kuiper. The service will compete directly with Elon Musk’s Starlink, which currently dominates the market and has 8,000 satellites in orbit.

The first Kuiper mission kicks off what will need to become a steady cadence of launches in order for Amazon to meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. The agency expects the company to have half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, up in the air by July 2026.

Amazon has booked more than 80 launches to deploy dozens of satellites at a time. In addition to ULA, its launch partners include Musk’s SpaceX (parent company of Starlink), European company Arianespace and Jeff Bezos’ space exploration startup Blue Origin.

Amazon is spending as much as $10 billion to build the Kuiper network. It hopes to begin commercial service for consumers, enterprises and government later this year.

In his shareholder letter earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Kuiper will require upfront investment at first, but eventually the company expects it to be “a meaningful operating income and ROIC business for us.” ROIC stands for return on invested capital.

Investors will be listening for any commentary around further capex spend on Kuiper when Amazon reports first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday.

WATCH: Amazon launches Project Kuiper prototypes

Amazon launches Project Kuiper prototypes to low orbit as tech giant enters satellite internet race

Technology

Oracle engineers caused days-long software outage at U.S. hospitals

Published

10 hours ago

April 28, 2025

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Oracle engineers caused days-long software outage at U.S. hospitals

Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 22, 2018.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at a number of Community Health Systems hospitals, causing the facilities to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.

CHS told CNBC that the outage involving Oracle Health, the company’s electronic health record (EHR) system, affected “several” hospitals, leading them to activate “downtime procedures.” Trade publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were hit.

The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement. The outage was resolved on Monday, and was not related to a cyberattack or other security incident.

CHS is based in Tennessee and includes 72 hospitals in 14 states, according to the medical system’s website.

“Despite this being a major outage, our hospitals were able to maintain services with no material impact,” the spokesperson said. “We are proud of our clinical and support teams who worked through the multi-day outage with professionalism and a commitment to delivering high-quality, safe care for patients.”

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Oracle didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses. It’s crucial software within the U.S. health-care system, and outages can cause serious disruptions to patient care. Oracle acquired EHR vendor Cerner in 2022 for $28.3 billion, becoming the second-biggest player in the market, behind Epic Systems.

Now that Oracle’s systems are back online, CHS said that the impacted hospitals are working to “re-establish full functionality and return to normal operations and procedures.”

Oracle’s CHS error comes weeks after the company’s federal electronic health record experienced a nationwide outage. Oracle has struggled with a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the Department of Veterans Affairs, marred by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle’s acquisition, and it temporarily paused deployment of the software in 2023.

WATCH: Interview with Oracle CEO Safra Catz