As you may remember, Mustafa Suleyman became the CEO of AI at Microsoft and then shortly after we heard that Mikhail Parakhin stepped down as the head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising. Since then, Mikhail Parakhin has been very quiet on X, but he did post one response this week on Mustafa Suleyman.

Steve Jurvetson posted a summary of Mustafa Suleyman’s talk at a TED event on X that is getting a lot of attention (and the image above it from him), he wrote:

The new CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, with a $100B budget at TED:


“AI is a new digital species.”


“To avoid existential risk, we should avoid:

1) Autonomy

2) Recursive self-improvement

3) Self-replication

We have a good 5 to 10 years before we’ll have to confront this.”

In response to that, one person on X looped in Mikhail Parakhin saying “we need you, not going to lie.” In which Mikhail replied, “Hard to disagree :-).”

Here are those posts:

The new CEO of Microsoft AI, @MustafaSuleyman, with a $100B budget at TED:

“AI is a new digital species.”

“To avoid existential risk, we should avoid:
1) Autonomy
2) Recursive self-improvement
3) Self-replication
We have a good 5 to 10 years before we’ll have to confront this.” pic.twitter.com/bUcEEOrawS

— Steve Jurvetson (@FutureJurvetson) April 22, 2024

Hard to disagree 🙂

— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) April 22, 2024

As I said before, We’ve quoted Mikhail Parakhin here countless times over the past couple of years, to hear that he is leaving the role makes me super sad. His transparency and willingness to listen to the community was amazing. I miss covering what Microsoft was working up behind the scenes around Bing and Copilot based on his early previews in his posts on X.

I am told from internal sources that Mikhail Parakhin is still working at Microsoft. And Mikhail confirmed so on X adding, “Yep, in the planning phase, will share more when I can.”

Thank you! Yep, in the planning phase, will share more when I can 🙂

— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) April 22, 2024

Forum discussion at X.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.