Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman describes content on the open web as ‘freeware’

A outstanding Microsoft Corp. executive said that content on the open web is “freeware” in a recent discussion on whether artificial intelligence models may use such material.

Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive officer of Microsoft AI, made the remarks during a Tuesday interview on the Aspen Ideas Festival. Windows Central reported the discussion today. Following an issue on whether “AI firms have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” Suleyman replied within the negative. He argued that AI models can use content on the open web since it’s effectively freeware, or mental property that may be used and modified at no charge. 

“With respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content for the reason that ’90s has been that it’s fair use,” Suleyman said. “Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, in the event you like. That’s been the understanding.”

Suleyman added that some forms of web content may not necessarily qualify as freeware. Particularly, he pointed to content from publishers which have instructed AI providers to not crawl their web sites. 

“There’s a separate category where an internet site or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, ‘don’t scrape or crawl me for every other reason than indexing me in order that other people can find that content.’ That’s a gray area and I believe that’s going to work its way through the courts,” Suleyman said.

Suleyman became the CEO of Microsoft AI earlier this yr after previously holding the identical role at Inflection AI Inc., a big language model developer he had co-founded in 2022. Microsoft hired Suleyman, Inflection AI co-founder Karén Simonyan and most of the startup’s other staffers in March through a deal reportedly price $650 million. The corporate also agreed to license Inflection AI’s LLMs.

Before Inflection AI, Suleyman cofounded DeepMind, a U.K.-based AI company that was acquired by Google LLC in 2014. DeepMind went on to turn into a core a part of the search giant’s machine learning research group. Suleyman was the top of applied AI on the group prior to launching Inflection AI.

The chief’s remarks this week on AI models’ use of online content drew significant attention because the subject is the main focus of several ongoing lawsuits. A few of those lawsuits were filed against Microsoft and OpenAI.

In December, The Latest York Times sued the 2 firms over the training dataset that was used to develop a few of OpenAI’s LLMs. The dataset allegedly drew on Common Crawl, a repository of web content that incorporates 16 million records from web sites operated by the Times. Moreover, the lawsuit charges that ChatGPT and Bing sometimes provide access to paywalled articles.

This past April, eight newspapers operated by investment firm Alden Global Capital filed an identical lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI. The group is accusing the 2 firms of using articles of their AI services without permission.

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