Mustafa Suleyman Isn’t Like Everyone Else in Silicon Valley

25:44So I'm very sensitive to those things because it's very clear that these things will cause harm. And I think that we have to be very, very careful about how we deploy them and how they're introduced into the world. Do you talk about this with your peers, with people like Sam Altman, who I know you're close to? Yes. I mean, I think everybody in the industry does. And there's definitely a group of the CEOs, obviously Sam and Dario from Anthropic were co-founders, me and Demis were co-founders. So we all know each other very, very well. And I think on the whole, everybody is genuinely committed to trying to find the right path through.

26:20It's also very competitive. So there's obviously a lot of that dynamic too. Yeah. Do you recognize the term broligarchy? I haven't heard that before, but I can figure out what it means. Yeah, I guess that's true. And it is very male-centric, although it should be said, Mira Murati, who's the ex-CTO of OpenAI's one of the best people in the field. Or tech bros. I'm sure you've heard that one. I don't know if you've seen Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead. Have you? No, I haven't. No. It is all about a group of people, one of whom is clearly Elon Musk, another one who looks like Peter Thiel or sounds like Peter Thiel.

26:56And it's, you know, it's quite a sobering portrait, his impression of life in this quite rarefied, very powerful circle. Yeah, and I think part of the challenge is that we all spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley where the skies are blue and, you know, life is very peaceful. I try to travel a lot. I just came back from China a couple of weeks ago where I was in five or six different cities. And it's just staggering to get out of the bubble and see how this technology is being developed on the other side of the world. And, you know, both the pace of innovation, but also, you know, I think the thoughtfulness of some of the regulatory stuff.

27:33I mean, I think they are definitely thinking pretty carefully about it as well. So it's impressive. I also come back to London a lot and make sure that I spend time outside of Silicon Valley. So if you have a different impression to someone like Jesse Armstrong or others about your world, can I ask you just to, because you know these key players, can you describe some of them in one word? Like if I say to you, Sam Altman, what word first comes into your mind? Oh, my God. Um, yeah, I guess courageous. Because? Well, you know, he's obviously sort of growing his data center fleet very, very aggressively.

28:13He may well turn out to be one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation. He's certainly achieved a lot. And I think now he's building data centers at a faster rate than I think anyone in the industry. And if he can pull it off, it will be pretty dramatic. It's interesting that there is an if on that. And I understand why there are huge amounts of money being spent by OpenAI. Is it a gamble? Is it not a given that it's going to pay off for them? Well, I think that ChatGPT is one of the greatest products that we've seen in a generation. And so that speaks for itself. At the same time, I guess they've signed over a trillion and a half dollars of commitments for building data centers over the next five or 10 years.

28:53Their revenues are quite a long way from there. So they've got a long way to go, but they're a very talented team. So I've got every confidence they can do it. Okay. So other descriptions. What word would you use to describe Demis Hassabis?

29:07Yeah, probably a great scientist. I mean, I think he's a great thinker and he's a good polymath. He's made massive contributions in the field multiple times. And so I think he's truly exceptional. You work together and now you're competitors. Yeah, but we started off as very, very close friends. And we worked together every day for 10 years and I learned a lot from him and have huge respect for him. Do you still talk? Yeah, we texted last night, actually. I congratulated him on the Nano Banana Gemini 3 and five years of Alpha Fold all in one week. Have you tried out Gemini 3? Because it is creating quite a lot of waves.

29:45Do you think it is better than ChatGPT? You know, they're kind of different. It's definitely got more kind of niche skills that ChatGPT doesn't have. And it's very fast. ChatGPT is very strong. So I wouldn't go that far. Okay. Is it better than Copilot? It can do things that Copilot can't do. I mean, Copilot has features that it doesn't have. Like Copilot is actually amazing for vision. One of my favorite features is like pull out your phone and talk about the world with Copilot in your hand. And it can see exactly what you're looking at. and you can talk about it and get feedback and opinions.

30:20You might be shopping for furniture or clothes. Yes, we're pushing the capabilities, but we're really trying to imagine what is the day-to-day experience of having this really intelligent assistant at your side that can talk to you about the world and help unblock you whenever you get stuck with something. Okay, I'm only going to do one more of these, but it's Elon Musk. How would you describe him? I guess as a bulldozer, He's kind of got superhuman capabilities to bend reality to his will and has, you know, pretty incredible track record. And somehow he sort of mostly manages to pull off what appears to be impossible.

31:01But yeah, probably different kind of set of values. I have interviewed him. Yes. He ended up calling me an NPC.

31:12I guess that was probably a form of bulldozing yeah I mean that's probably a good example that sounds like exactly like Elon I kind of like that he speaks his mind I mean he's very unfiltered I think you've said that your politics are different from him and Peter Thiel's that the libertarian you know not much value to the nation state etc it's not your world would you call yourself as being on the left of the political spectrum? Or is there a different description you'd use? I would say I'm sort of a centrist these days. I definitely started as a lefty. But yeah, I'm proud to say that I'm on the kind of center left of the spectrum.

31:51I believe that government plays an important role in society. It's a controversial thing to say in Silicon Valley, but I think regulation is necessary and it has made most technologies better. And people forget this. Like cars only work because we have driver training and emissions regulations and streetlights and motorway speed limits and so on and so forth. And so that's what regulation is when it works well. And we just need more of that. Do you feel isolated saying that? Because clearly the Trump administration is not into regulation. And the industry overall is quite happy with that. Yeah, I think that right now we are not in a mode where there is huge catastrophic harm.

32:38The industry has done a pretty good job of introducing very powerful chatbots in a way where the personality is sculpted to be very even-handed, to be very evidence-based. I think that it didn't have to go like that. It went like that, I think, because the leaders have done a pretty decent job. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be issues coming up. and I'm obviously very wide-eyed about them, but I don't think we're in a mode where we need emergency regulation. For example, some of the regulations that have been proposed in Europe are currently in talks to be wound back with the EUAI Act.

33:13And people shouldn't criticize that. That's like the process working. That's the regulator taking feedback, seeing how things work in practice. That should be celebrated. But at the same time, they have to be able to have the freedom to experiment and try new regulations. So I think that's a good thing. Do you think, Mustafa, you see some of these issues differently now that you are right at the heart of one of the biggest companies of all? Because in your book, The Coming Wave, and in a piece you wrote about the same time for Foreign Affairs, you were quite clear on how much governance was needed.

33:46In fact, you said like you wanted three different kinds of governance regimes modelled on climate change and financial stability and arms control, that AI and tech could learn from all three of those. and yet you sound much more sanguine now. Is it just because of where you are? I'm still calling for those things. We should have a financial stability board for AI. We should have a climate process, an ICANN, which basically goes and audits the progress that we're making. I advocated for the White House AI principles under the Biden administration, where we made voluntary commitments as companies.

34:20At the time, it was my startup inflection, but we pushed all the other companies to do it as well, where you disclose the size of your model. We've signed up to those disclosures in Europe and with the UK AI Safety Institute. So, yeah, yeah, I don't mean to say that we don't need it. I'm saying that these are such long-term effects and these governance processes take so long to build that we basically got to start now. But what we don't need is knee-jerk reaction. We don't need some panicked overreaction because that would cause a different set of problems. The superintelligence work you're doing and indeed, you know, everything that you're doing in AI in the moment, You're in a new phase, aren't you?

34:57Because now that you've got a revised agreement with OpenAI, you suddenly have the freedom to pursue AI independently. Help me understand how that relationship with OpenAI is going to work in future, because you've been collaborators, Microsoft and OpenAI, for a long time. Now you're also going to be competitors. How does that work? It's a sort of complicated setup for people to follow along to. But the bottom line is that up until a few weeks ago, Microsoft was not allowed by contract to pursue artificial general intelligence or superintelligence independently. And the deal with OpenAI was that it would then go and build AGI when they signed the agreements back in 2019.

35:39And in return, Microsoft would build the AI infrastructure, the chips and the data centers. And in return from providing the chips, Microsoft would get a license to the models that have been built. And we still have that license to everything that OpenAI builds up until 2032. But OpenAI decided that they wanted to take on more compute and buy compute from other providers. And so they now have deals with SoftBank and many others, Oracle, to build more data centers than Microsoft wanted to build for them. And so in return, we then have the right to go and develop our own AI. And obviously, that was a big part of me joining the company 18 months ago.

36:22But we're now hiring out a super intelligence team and pursuing our own AI development. So was that deal a relief to you? Because without it, how much could you have done as Microsoft's AI chief? Well, I mean, a lot. I mean, we have$280 billion of revenue, all major institutions in the world, and they need to be able to use our AI features and our AI tools every single day. So, you know, we've still been a general purpose AI development shop over the last 18 months, but now we can work on some techniques and methodologies that have the potential to exceed human performance at all tasks. And so it is a shift for us.

37:02Does your relationship with OpenAI include not poaching each other's staff? Because we've just had another bit of evidence of the talent wall that's underway. You've just lost one of your key people to Apple. Yeah, he's going to go and run the Apple lab. I mean, look, I think that there's huge rotation. I mean, the talent in the industry, we just got a whole bunch of people from Google DeepMind. We've got people from OpenAI. I mean, there's a lot of rotation. This is part of the industry. So there's certainly no poach agreements. That would not be legal. People can go work for whoever they want to go work for.

37:38And I think that at this time in the industry, it's just very, very competitive. And does that mean that you are prepared to, and are you already matching the kinds of sums that Meta's been spending, the$100 to$200 million packages? I don't think anyone's matching those things. Zuck's taken a particular approach that involves sort of hiring a lot of individuals rather than maybe creating a team. And I don't really think that's the right approach. I think what we did well at DeepMind is that we were very selective. What I've been doing at Microsoft over the last year and a half is adding people incrementally who fit the culture and who suit the skill set and work well with the rest of the group, weeding out those who don't and being very, very attentive to the details.

38:24So we're very much creating a team rather than a set of individuals. So you're not prepared to match salary offers on that scale because that was what was recently reported. Yeah, I mean, that was the rumor. I think that was, you know, obviously very, very unprecedented and may have been the case for a few individuals, but that's certainly not the norm. Would you rather he, Mark Zuckerberg or Zuck as you call him, would you rather he rethought that? Does it make life much more difficult for you? No, not at all. I mean, I think that he's all in, right? He's building a two gigawatt data center, which will probably cost him a couple hundred billion dollars over the next two or three years.

39:01And I think he said publicly to Trump that he's going to spend upwards of$600 billion in the next three years on data centers. And, you know, luckily for Microsoft, like we have 33 gigawatts of compute capacity in our fleet. Our primary business is to build data centers and provide them to third parties. And so we can either use that for our own training, or we can use it for inference where we sell it to third parties. So we've got a very, very good setup in that sense. We're kind of hedged against that risk. Can you see why people worry about the, not just the amounts of money being spent by the industry, but the circular range of a lot of those deals?

39:42You know, you're an investor in open AI. They're also buying services from you. Everyone seems to be in a relationship with NVIDIA. There's a huge amount, a huge proportion of the US economy that is dependent on things continuing to go well for firms like yours. Yeah, I mean, I think that's fair. Obviously, customers and providers have often invested in one another and, you know, provides good stimulus to get us going. But it's something to watch. I'm definitely watching it carefully. and I think others are too. So, you know, I think that getting the balance right is very important. We have to deliver in the next few years.

40:19I mean, every team now is building incredibly large, very powerful computers, and we're taking a huge bet that we're going to be able to convert this into true intelligence. And if we do, then I think the world is going to look very, very different. I mean, we will have abundant intelligence on tap. And I think people still underrate how phenomenal that is. You say the world, except that this is really about two countries, the US and China. That's where almost all the labs are. That's true. And everything has concentrated even more around Silicon Valley in the last 18 months. And that's sort of natural.

40:56I mean, I think we see that in a lot of other historical technology trends. At the same time, open source is doing very well. And the cost of production is also going through the floor. So it costs 90 % less to ask a question of one of the best AI models in the world than it did two years ago. You don't get curves that fall that quickly in any other discipline. And obviously, when the cost goes down, everybody gets access. So I don't think there's going to be an access issue. Is there anything you look back on now that you would have done differently? Because you're still only in your early 40s, so you've got a lot of remarkable achievements.

41:36But is there anything left undone or that you reflect on? Yeah, I really want to nail medical superintelligence. And, you know, I started DeepMind Health back in 2015. And, you know, we published a lot of great papers and we had a lot of clinical trials, but we didn't quite get there. And this time around, I think that's going to be the most magical application. I want to do more in energy efficiency and battery storage, developing new compounds for renewables and so on. I think that AI will really transform the energy industry. So those are my two sort of big focuses, I think. And is that what your day's like, that when the engineers, your team are saying to you, we can do this and this, you're saying, this is how I want to use it?

42:23What we're always focused on is, can we build general purpose models that are as smart as humans at all capabilities? I mean, that is the number one goal. And then the question is, how do we apply them? where do we use them? What can they do for people? You know, I'm actually very proud of a lot of the use cases in Copilot. I mean, many people are using it for companionship, emotional support, therapy, making difficult life decisions, has given me high quality access to information, has given me emotional support, and is helping keep me organized. And so... What do you mean helping you get emotional support?

43:00So basically, I have a practice that at the end of the day, when I'm in the car driving home, I have like a five or ten minute conversation with Copilot about something that was tricky in my day or something that I felt frustrated about. Maybe emotional support's a little strong, but it's just like having a chat with a friend and kind of downloading, really, on what went well and what didn't. And once you build that memory up over time, it gets really helpful because it personalizes. So Copilot now remembers most of what you say and it will personalize its answers to you and refer to something that you said last week, for example, or a trend or a pattern.

43:39And that is just like super helpful. I feel kind of refreshed after a conversation. I feel like I've let go of some things, like a burden that I've released. So it is a friend, a therapist, a family member almost? Yeah, it's a little bit of everything. That's always the challenge when we're trying to, you know, sort of understand a new technology and come up with words to describe something which is a little bit like many other things, but is also fundamentally different. This is what an AI is now. I just wonder if there's any aspect of that that makes you pause. People go home and maybe they don't have to bother talking to others in their life in the same way because they've said it all and they've got what they need back.

44:26Yeah, or the flip side is they don't have to take it out on their partner or their best friends. I still call my best friends every weekend and have a good old chat. So I think if anything, it's actually deepened some of my relationships with my friends. I come to those conversations just feeling a little lighter and more ready to talk about other things. And your family, where are your parents now? And how do they feel about the choices you made? Yeah, no, I think my mum's very, you know, she's a proud mum. She's very excited. And she uses Copilot. She used Pi before this. In fact, I went to see her three or four weeks ago and she was still using pie.

45:04And I was like, that's amazing. Which is what you founded at Inflection, right? Yeah, I was quite impressed to see that. She still has voice calls with it. And just throughout the whole day, we'll be walking around the garden and she'll pull out her phone and she'll scan a plant and talk about whether this is a chestnut tree and which variety it is and could I grow it at home and when we're in the park and stuff. And so, like, it's amazing to see her just naturally use it in her everyday life. And I think that is quite gratifying. Do you see your future in the US, Mustafa? Because I'm sure the UK would love to have you back.

45:40I would have loved to have started inflection in the UK. I'm very British in mentality. But one of the things that I don't like is the tall poppy syndrome. I think that there's not enough of a culture of risk taking. there's a little bit of a taboo around commercialization and making money and starting companies and being entrepreneurial and there's not enough of a kind of celebration of experimentation and failure whereas in the valley everyone's nuts and everyone loves failure so they're just like constantly talking about how things are going wrong and how this was a disaster and it's very liberating i mean it's also very cheesy and it's you know you can grate when you're kind of a bit of a cynical English person.

46:24But when you get into the rhythm of it, it's great. Everyone's great. Everyone's up for it. But I'm wondering whether there is actually something, it's not just chat. It is actually like if you're talking about failure in that way, you are braver about it or just, you know, it's normal. It's something you have to go through. It's a different mindset. Yeah, exactly. And there's also a kind of hustle culture. It's quite humbling to see everybody just on the make, trying to understand some new technology, random non-technical people reading science papers. You know, in a Starbucks or whatever, there'll be someone on their laptop watching a machine learning video.

47:03You'll be reading a book in a coffee shop and you'll overhear two people who don't know each other just try to spark a conversation that might turn into something. It's just like, there's just an energy. And I think I would love for that to be the case in London too. And I think it could be, but we've got to have political leaders who celebrate risk-taking and business. Finally, I need you to prepare me for what AI will do to my life. Or right now, do you think AI could have had this conversation with you? Or could it have done a better job than me? You can break it to me if you think AI could have done a better job than me interviewing you?

47:43Probably not today, but maybe if you had prepared with an AI, then, you know, it could have given you questions to ask and stuff. Although you did do a lot of detailed research, so your team's obviously very good. I do think that there are going to be AI reporters. You know, so I run MSN, the news service at Microsoft. One of the things I'm very excited about is how AI news reporters can reinvigorate local news. So imagine that there are hundreds of thousands of AI reporters that can make phone calls into people who are at the scene, who can verify eyewitness footage, conduct interviews, stitch those together into little montages, and not just do it for big national stories where the investment is justified, but do it at a very, very local level to provide accurate and factually reliable information.

48:37I think that people need to have the courage to be optimistic about how these things can actually improve our system. Are you developing AI reporters for Emerson? We're exploring everything. You know, I'm also on the board of The Economist and have been talking to them a lot about it. And, you know, I think that we're exploring all kinds of things at the moment. So AI reporters will happen. AI interviewers? I think, I suspect yes, from what you're saying. You've got a little bit longer, maybe six months. I'm kidding well are you? I'm not sure you are no I am kidding it's going to be plenty it's going to be a very very long time it's really a long time to get it perfect you know I mean this was this was exceptional Mustafa Suleiman thank you very much for talking to us thank you very much Michal this was a lot of fun

49:28and that's the Michal Hussain show for this week if you follow us you'll know as soon as there's a new episode And if you'd like to email us, please use michelleshow at bloomberg.net. By the way, if you've left us a rating or a comment, thank you. These conversations are also on YouTube and on Bloomberg TV. And there's a text version with my own thoughts in note form. You'll find those at bloomberg.com slash weekend. Our producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martlew. The executive producer is Louisa Lewis. Guest booking by Dave Warren. Sound engineer Richard Ward. Video editing Evando Thompson and Megan Olson.

50:12Social media is by Alex Morgan. And the music is by Bart Warshaw. At Bloomberg Weekend, Brendan Francis Newnham is editorial director of Audio and Special Projects. And our executive editor is Catherine Bell. We'd also like to thank Summer Saadi and the Bloomberg podcast team. and thank you for listening. Until next time, goodbye.

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