Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said he’s in regular contact with his peers in artificial intelligence, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.
In fact, Suleyman and Hassabis once worked together as cofounders of DeepMind, though Suleyman went on to cofound Inflection AI then joined Microsoft last year.
In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg on Friday, he was asked to share his thoughts on some of his fellow AI leaders, including Altman, whose startup recently completed a for-profit restructuring and revamped its partnership with Microsoft.
He described Altman as “courageous,” noting that OpenAI is aggressively building out a fleet of AI data centers to handle the massive amount of computing power needed to run ChatGPT.
“He may well turn out to be one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation,” Suleyman added. “He’s certainly achieved a lot. He’s building data centers at a faster rate than anyone in the industry, and if he can pull it off, it will be pretty dramatic.”
And despite concerns that OpenAI’s investment commitments far outstrip its current level of revenue, he said he has every confidence the company can pull it off.
As for Hassabis, Suleyman called him a great scientist. “I think he’s a great thinker and he’s a good polymath. He’s made massive contributions in the field, multiple times. He’s truly exceptional.”
Suleyman also revealed that even though the one-time collaborators are now competitors, they remain good friends and stay in touch regularly. He even texted Hassabis recently to congratulate him on Nano Banana, Gemini 3 and AlphaFold.
Then he was asked about Elon Musk, who is an OpenAI cofounder but has since fallen out with Altman and is pursuing AI through his startup xAI. Suleyman called him a “bulldozer.”
“He’s kind of got superhuman capabilities to bend reality to his will and has, you know, pretty incredible track record,” he added. “And somehow he sort of mostly manages to pull off what appears to be impossible.”
Not only did Musk disrupt the auto and space sectors with Tesla and SpaceX, respectively, he’s charging into medical technology with Neuralink and transportation with the Boring Co.
He also dove into politics, becoming the top Republican donor last year, and briefly joining the Trump administration. He feuded with the president this summer, but they have shown some signs of warming up lately.
While Musk has a “different kind of set of values,” Suleyman said, “I kind of like that he speaks his mind. He’s very unfiltered.”
