Microsoft AI Chief Suleyman Shuffles Unit Leadership, Pointing to Shift in Strategy

In case you missed it, my colleagues broke news yesterday about Anthropic’s attempt to draft off OpenAI’s pending fundraising, by looking to do its own funding round. 

Like OpenAI, Anthropic wants to double its valuation. Whether it can do so despite weaker financials remains to be seen! 

On to today’s issue… 

It’s been a while since Microsoft told the world anything about its development of generative artificial intelligence that could reduce its reliance on OpenAI technology. A recent Microsoft organizational change we’ve learned about suggests the company may have exhausted the limits of one recent approach.

Earlier this year, Microsoft appeared to be doubling down on a strategy known as distillation. It involves using OpenAI’s models to generate lots of data, which Microsoft then uses to train its own, similar models that can perform nearly as well at certain tasks and that Microsoft can sell as it pleases. (OpenAI and Microsoft have always sold OpenAI models at the same price, though a Microsoft spokesperson said it had the ability to price the models at a different "fair market price.")