Microsoft's AI chief needs a history lesson to get off the Kool Aid

Will Big Tech Caesars' theft of the open web for AI repeat history's greatest tragedy, and set humanity back 1,000 years...

On the radio last week, an interviewer asked me my opinion on the comments of Microsoft’s new AI chief that everything on the open web was freeware for him to use.

I retorted that it represented the greatest destruction of human intellectual property since the Library of Alexandria was razed 2,000 years ago.

Coming off air, I mused on why Mustafa Suleyman’s comments at the Aspen Ideas Festival had so triggered me.

“With respect to content that’s on the open web, the social contract since the 90s has been that it’s fair use,” he said.

“Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. It’s been freeware if you like. That’s been the understanding.”

Suleyman’s no mug. I’ve followed his progress for years. He’s the English son of a taxi driver and a nurse, so not a US tech bro.

Until now, he’s been humble, and smart enough to avoid obvious landmines like this, so what changed?

Has Microsoft’s $4 billion cheque led him to the Kool Aid? Has he pivoted to the Big Tech playbook? Has the FTC’s probe into his deal turned him to the Dark Side?

I resolved to break down his interview line-by-line to analyse just how much one of AI’s blue flame thinkers has changed.

Doing so was also insightful for me to explore how Big Tech buys time, palms off regulators, and weaponises AI to frighten politicians, so it can grow unhindered.

Surprisingly, my research exposed a fragility in Big Tech’s strategy that can be used against them, and it suggests it has only three years left before the wheels fly off.

My search for the cause of Suleyman’s change of tone began 2,309 years ago. Let’s go…