Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was literally laughing when he spoke to CNBC in Davos about the new rift in Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI. Microsoft is no longer OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider as part of OpenAI's plans to partner with SoftBank and Oracle on a $500 billion data center project called Stargate.

"I think it's important for OpenAI to get to other platforms quickly because Microsoft is building its own AI, and I don't think Microsoft will be using OpenAI in the future. They're going to have their own cutting-edge models," Benioff predicted with a laugh. "That's why they hired Mustafa Suleiman. Mustafa Suleiman and Sam Altman were not the best of friends."

Benioff said their dislike was evident a year ago at the Davos trade show, where "Sam and Mustafa were on a panel together and didn't get along."

The days of Microsoft exclusively hosting OpenAI are doomed to come to an end. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, several years before OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. Now, OpenAI seems destined to achieve tech giant status of its own, perhaps one day competing with Microsoft. OpenAI also blamed product delays on a lack of available compute, suggesting it needs more data center capacity than Microsoft can (or might want to) provide. OpenAI's exclusive agreement with Microsoft will terminate as soon as OpenAI implements the AGI agreed upon by both parties. According to Sam Altman, general artificial intelligence is now possible.

Some reports indicate that tensions between the two companies have been growing since at least mid-2023, when OpenAI released its own competing enterprise product. After Altman was fired and returned as OpenAI CEO in late 2023, employees at both companies told Business Insider that they really didn't like working together. Some employees said OpenAI employees tended to look down on Microsoft employees.

Just a few months later, in early 2024, Nadella dismissed him and hired DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead Microsoft AI. (Microsoft has not responded to our request for comment.)

While Benioff may hope that Microsoft abandons OpenAI entirely in the future, that may just be wishful thinking, even though Microsoft is reportedly developing its own LLM MAI-1. Still, when Microsoft announced a new artificial intelligence group led by Jay Parikh earlier this month to build artificial intelligence agents and applications, the post didn't even mention OpenAI.

The latest rift in the partnership is good news for Benioff. Salesforce also uses OpenAI's enterprise model and is an investor in OpenAI competitor Anthropic.

Even so, Benioff's observations about Suleiman weren't entirely wrong. Suleyman is known to dismiss Altman's vision, especially when it comes to AGI, and admitted in an interview with The Verge last month that there was "no tension here and there" about the OpenAI partnership.

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