Microsoft has poached (hired) a bunch of executives from Ai2, where Ali Farhadi is now a Corporate Vice President.

Farhadi, Hanna Hajishirzi, and Ranjay Krishna are expected to join Mustafa Suleyman’s organization at Microsoft while retaining their faculty positions at the UW’s Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. Also joining is Sophie Lebrecht, the former Ai2 chief operating officer.

My skepticism in Microsoft’s ability to keep up in LLMs, AI products and even to keep Microsoft relevant vs. the SaaS apocalypse is increasing as we get further into 2026.

Mustafa Suleyman working on “Superintelligence” at Microsoft is almost laughable.

Satya Nadella should step down, he’s over his head in the AI era. Microsoft’s stock is down over 21% so far in 2026. I can’t think of a bigger failure in corporate AI than Microsoft’s Copilot. Not like I expected much I saw this all play out when Cortana came out in the Voice speaker era.

Not like I had a high opinion of Ai2 to begin with. The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit research institute. Ai2 was almost entirely funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen through his company Vulcan Inc. and later his estate.

In mid-March 2026, Satya Nadella reorganized Microsoft’s AI leadership. Mustafa Suleyman, head of the Microsoft AI group, will focus more on developing generative AI models. Jacob Andreou (formerly Snap) will lead the Copilot experience across consumer and commercial, driving design, product, growth, and engineering.

How bad is Microsoft in AI? Microsoft’s Copilot app had 6 million daily active users in February, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT had 440 million and Google’s Gemini had 82 million, according to data from app analytics company Sensor Tower.