Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, is trying to walk a fine line. On the one hand, he thinks that the industry is taking AI in a dangerous direction by building chatbots that present as human: He worries that people will be tricked into seeing life instead of lifelike behavior.
On the other hand, Suleyman runs a product shop that must compete with those peers. Last week, Microsoft announced a string of updates to its Copilot chatbot designed to make Copilot more expressive, engaging, and helpful.
Will Douglas Heaven, our senior AI editor, talked to Suleyman about the tension at play when it comes to designing our interactions with chatbots and his ultimate vision for what this new technology should be. Read the full story.
An AI adoption riddle
—James O’Donnell, senior AI reporter
A few weeks ago, I set out on what I thought would be a straightforward reporting journey.
After years of momentum for AI, hype had been slightly punctured. First there was the underwhelming release of GPT-5 in August. Then a report released two weeks later found that 95% of generative AI pilots were failing, which caused a brief stock market panic. I wanted to know: Which companies are spooked enough to scale back their AI spending?
But if AI’s hype has indeed been punctured, I couldn’t find a company willing to talk about it. So what should we make of my failed quest?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
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