Microsoft 2.5: Superintelligence leader Ali Farhadi points company toward AI self-sufficiency

Ah, marvellous. Microsoft has evidently decided that the correct path to superintelligence is to brand it like a mid-cycle software refresh: "Microsoft 2.5," a version number that screams "we've fixed a few things, but don't ask about the regression bugs." GeekWire's profile of Ali Farhadi, the company's Superintelligence leader, reveals the grand plan: the Microsoft AI (MAI) unit is now "focused almost entirely" on building its own frontier-level models. Farhadi, announcing this in a LinkedIn post with the confidence of a man who's just invented the wheel, lists Microsoft's advantages: data, search, coding, infrastructure, agents, software and Fortune 500 companies taking dependencies on Microsoft. Splendid. Everything you need to win the AI race, except perhaps a model that doesn't require a footnote to explain.

The "almost entirely" is a gift to cynics. It implies the previous strategy was "focused somewhat," which is corporate-speak for "we were hedging, and our bankers noticed." And the Fortune 500 dependencies boast? Dependencies, in enterprise speak, are what you call customers still calculating the cost of leaving. That's not winning; that's being the last car in the car park, insisting the others don't matter because you've got the best parking spot. While the Superintelligence team builds frontier models in-house, one question lingers: who will tell existing customers that self-sufficiency means fewer excuses for missing the frontier? Probably not Farhadi; he's busy enumerating his pieces on LinkedIn.

Still, we should thank him for the transparency. When your primary strategic document is a public post listing your own assets like a child's show-and-tell, it's fair to suspect the internal whiteboard was just a drawing of a turtle wearing a hat. Microsoft 2.5: all the pieces, no assembly required, batteries sold separately, firmware update promised next quarter. The superintelligence leader is pointing the company toward self-sufficiency — which is good, because with this much hubris, they're certainly self-sufficient already.