¶ Introduction from Mishal Husain
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
At some point over the next twenty or thirty years, machines are going to be more capable than humans are doing most work, and so we have to decide as a society what our purpose is.
What's the first solemn? The AI founder who is now at the forefront of a global race.
Getting the balance right is very important. We have to deliver in the next few years. 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.
We will have abundant intelligence. On tap.
From Bloomberg Weekend. This is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm Michelle Hussein. Back in twenty sixteen, a computer beat a world champion in the ancient game Go. You might remember it because it certainly made the news of the time. It was a huge milestone artificial intelligence, which few of us had ever really heard about, was uncovering strategies that
hadn't been seen over centuries of human players. One of those who made it happen at the startup Deep Mind, is now leading AI for Microsoft, but Mustapha Suleiman is an unusual figure in big tech. He's British for starters, He's interested in technology and public services. He used to work in local government in the UK. He's seen climate
talks up close from the inside. Today though his work is at the heart of an AI arms race, the big names spending huge sums and making all sorts of promises on what it can do and when, which is why I'd say he's really worth a listen, not only to understand what's happening right now in this crucial field, but also to understand one of its most influential players. So here's my conversation with mustafas Leman, starting with his own everyday use of AI.
¶ Suleyman's daily use of AI
Yesterday night, I stayed up far too late watching a film, and afterwards I added to a table that I've made in co pilot, which basically records all the films that I love, films that I want to watch, lists them by date, describes what they were about. I add my personal notes to it, gives me a link to the film poster, and I can keep just saying, okay, to add this film that I want to watch, what would be a similar one that I want to watch?
So, just like you might ask.
An assistant to organize your life, and I think that people will be surprised. The more obscure, the more creative, the more challenging you think the task is that you're going to ask your AI or co pilot, the better.
But have you used it to do autonomous tasks? So, for example, has it booked tickets for you or bought a gift for you? Because I know this is one of the promises of co pilot, It's just not available in my region, so I haven't been able to try it out for myself yet.
We're still experimenting with it.
It can do it, it doesn't always get it right, so it's in like a sort of dev mode, so it's not like generally available just yet. But when it does work, it is the most magical thing you've ever seen.
Okay, what are the mistakes it's made that have created problems for you? Bord a present for the wrong person, Well.
It can buy the wrong thing, but obviously you can intervene and it will always ask you permission before it takes the next action and stuff, so it's it's quite safe. It's one of those things with technology, you know it promises so much and it's always sort of just around the corner.
I remember, like the allure of.
Getting a discman back in the nineties, and I had this dream that I was going to be roll blading down the street, and then I got one, and obviously it didn't have any kind of vibration proof shop proof technology yet, and so it would skip every time, like I turned it on its side or tried to put it in my back pocket.
And so it's a funny thing. Technology.
It's still magical and amazing, but it's always just got a little bit further to go. And I think in this case, it's a while yet before it's every day.
And I guess that given everything you've seen, you're one of the founders of deep Mind, and you've worked at Google and had your own AI company inflection before you came to Microsoft. Does that mean that when you see these hiccups or these stages of development, you have faith. You don't get frustrated because you remember the moment when back in twenty sixteen when your AI model beat the world champion at go, which was a huge moment for AI.
I think I'm very stoic about these things, like I
¶ Stoicism and the magic of AI
know that it's going to work in the next six months or twelve months, or maybe the worst case, eighteen months. But you know, I think we've got a pretty good rhythm now of picking things which are not too far away but are genuinely transformative. And also, you know, it's important to remember how magical it is today. It can
generate images, it can generate videos. It is already you know, sort of superhuman magical, And I think I'm just one of those people that's still inspired by what it can do at any given moment.
By this time next year, could I be buying my Christmas presents using an autonomous AI agent.
I'm pretty certain that you will be. Yeah, I think it's highly highly likely.
So, speaking of magical things, the recent announcement that you made at Microsoft about superintelligence. That's the term which has really crept into the public debate thanks to you and others in the last few months. When you use the term superintelligence, what does it mean to you?
¶ Defining superintelligence
Super intelligent in the industry today means an AI system that can learn any new task and perform better than all human combined at all tasks.
So it is a very.
High bar and at the moment it comes with a great deal of risk. It is not clear. In fact, it's very uncertain how we would limit its capabilities and align to get a system like that to care a lot about humans and want us to succeed and flourish. It's very unclear how we would contain and aligned a
system that is so much more powerful than us. And so the framing that I prefer is one of a humanist superintelligence, one that is always in our corner, on our team, aligned to human interests, and until we can prove that it will remain safe, we won't continue to develop a system that has the potential to run away from us and to get out the box.
And I think that that's an obvious thing to say.
Everybody should agree to that, and yet I think it's kind of a novel position in the industry.
At the moment.
So is that how you're trying to set Microsoft apart? A lot of people are working on superintelligence. Are you trying to make my SELT distinctive by saying we will always use it through a humanist lens?
Yes, that is our position. You know, Microsoft is a company that's been around for fifty years. It is very careful,
it's highly trusted. Ninety percent of the s and P five hundred use us to provide email and operating systems and everyday productivity tools which are now among the best in the world with co Pilot, And you know, I think that we've got that reputation because the company has been careful and we're going to continue to be careful, and setting out a vision of humanist superintelligences is part of that program.
So what does that mean for your rivals in that field,
¶ The AI Wild West
some of whom you work closely with, like open AI, which I'm sure we'll talk more about. But does it mean that they're the wild West and you're the moral ones.
I think that everybody has to decide what they stand for and how they operate, and I don't I don't want to judge how they're operating right now. I don't see any evidence of large scale mass harm. I don't see any indication that these things are improving themselves or operating autonomously. But we all predict a time in the next five years, maybe in the next ten years, where these capabilities do start to emerge and systems like this could set their own goals, or they could improve their
own code, or they could act autonomously. Those things are capabilities that I've clearly outlined as increasing the level of risk, and therefore we have to approach them with caution, with more transparency and audit, with more government engagement, and make proactive declarations about how close we are to those three capabilities.
And does that mean that you won't be releasing a superintelligence tool until you're confident that it can be controlled.
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think for sure the containment and alignment unnecessary prerequisites their red lines, and I think everybody in the industry has to sign up to that idea. I mean, nobody wants to cause mass harmon fundamentally, even though we all disagree. Clearly, everybody is committed to the survival of our species and I would hope the kind of flourishing and well being of everybody.
So that's the discussion that we're trying to push now and require everybody to ask themselves in the industry, are they building a humanist superintelligence? Does it really stand for people and for our species?
First?
Yeah, I'm just wondering how much confidence we can really
¶ Humans misusing technology
have in that given that things do go wrong and I don't just mean AI, I mean humans do wrong. Things. All things just go wrong for other reasons. And the recent example that Microsoft had to deal with was having to cease and disable some services that were being used by the Israeli Ministry of Defense after reporting by The Guardian that suggested they could be being used for mass surveillance.
That was very good reporting by the Guardian.
We were very grateful for it, and as soon as we became aware of it, we actually made all the necessary changes, removed the IDF from those servers and I think, you know, they were clearly not in compliance with our terms of service, and there's an ongoing investigation internally.
But I guess the broader point is that it's hard to have confidence of controls and checks and balances and uses.
It is hard.
I mean, these are huge and complicated systems that they carry a lot of risk, and the most that we can do is make sure that we are auditing them and we're removing actors that violate our terms of service as quickly as possible.
So are the first uses of superintelligence going to be in the medical field?
I think so.
I think that this is probably the most exciting application of superintelligence. I think we now have systems that can diagnose any rare condition that is found in the literature significantly better than human performance, and do so with fewer
tests and interventions. And that's the key thing. It's like, often it's actually quite expensive to run medical intervention tests before you get to a diagnosis, and often they can be unnecessary to and they take time, and then in that process, you know the condition came off wor in our case, our system does this significantly more cheaply, with fewer tests and with higher accuracy.
We're just putting it.
Through independent peer review at the moment, and soon there'll be clinical trials of it too.
So I think this is very, very, very exciting.
And did you push for that focus yourself, because you've been running Microsoft AI for a while, about eighteen months now. Super Intelligence was a big recent announcement, and I'm conscious as I hear you talk about it that your mother was a nurse and you, unusually for senior people in tech, you've worked in the public sector as well.
Yeah, I mean this is an area that's very important to me.
Obviously, my mum was in an HS nurse and you know,
¶ Promise of abundance, universal basic income
I'm just a big believer that technology is here to serve us. It should make our lives better, should make us more comfortable one day. I think it is going to help us to live longer, give us the option to work less if we choose to. I do think it's going to produce abundance, and I think that we have to make conscious decisions to use it for those applications first, and that that's why, you know, even back at Deep Mind, I ran our health unit, and you know, I'm very passionate about this.
Abundance is such a big promise. Tell me what you mean by it, because most of the time we hear about AI destroying jobs. But are you saying that the work will be done by AI increasingly and therefore we humans won't have to work as much.
I mean, I think that it is inevitable that at some point over the next twenty or thirty years, machines are going to be more capable than humans are doing
most work, and that might come much sooner. And so we have to decide as a society what our purpose is, and we have to be very thoughtful about the rate of introduction of new machines because we have to make sure that that rate of displacement is counterbalanced with a mechanism to fund people and to support people through a massive transition, which for which there is probably not going to be other jobs on the other side that are
more competitive than what a machine can do. And so this is a real big step change in what it is to organize society.
But do you believe in the idea of a universal basic income that that's what AI being very productive making the economy more productive could unlock.
Yeah, I mean, I think I've long been on record saying that I think that is both inevitable and very desirable. We already live in a world of abundance, it's just poorly distributed. We already have more calories to consume, we have an incredible amount of food wastage.
It's just unevenly distributed.
And now that value isn't just manifested in atoms like food and cars and physical things. It's manifested in digital goods ideas, knowledge intelligence. And that's actually great news because that can proliferate, it can spread extremely quickly around the
entire world. I mean, these llms and chatbots have been the fastest spreading technology in history, basically two billion and a users in the space of three years, and that's actually amazing because it's delivering knowledge to every single person who wants to use it on their phone in the
current sort of format and device they already use. So I think that we have no problem with getting technology out and available to everybody because there's going to be massive competitive forces to reduce the cost of experiencing an AI. The challenge we're going to have to figure out is how we tax and redistribute so that the transition is a healthy one.
¶ Suleyman's family and decision to drop out of Oxford
Tell me more about where these ideas and your beliefs come from. Your mother was a nurse. But the family you grew up in in London in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, how would you describe it?
Preally working class there. My dad was a mini cab driver, my mom works in.
HS and yeah, I mean we were fairly regular, like kind of unremarkable. My parents didn't supervalue education stuff. They always tho actually go get trade and my mom would often say to me, you know, you should be a carpenter electrician, you know, leave scot sixteen and stuff. So I don't know, it comes from a place of just experiencing the kind of rougher end of things a little bit and then having just a desire to try to do the best that we can do with the short life that we have.
Your dad had come to the UK from Syria. Did your parents meet in England?
Yes, yeah, that's right.
And what happened when you were sixteen must have had because I read that when your parents split up, you and your brother, your younger brother, were pretty much left to fend for themselves.
Ah, that's true.
Yeah, I don't know where you've read that, but yeah, me and my younger brother did live on our own for a few years.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you mentioned this in a Guardian interview a couple of years ago when your book was coming out, But I'm really curious to know more about what it taught you and how you dealt with it at the time.
I think that when you're that age, you're just sort of precocious and overconfident and fearless. We had everything we needed and it worked out pretty well.
And this isn't a crucial time the last couple of years of school, and you did do well in those last couple of years of school because you ended up getting to Oxford.
Yeah.
I was very lucky because I had great teachers and good mentors, and I went to a very good school which was far from my home, but you could do exams to get in, so I studied really hard for when I was ten years old for the entrance exams, and it was essentially like going to a private school. Basically everyone was like very studious and got great grades and stuff. And yeah, I was lucky enough to get into Oxford, and you know, that was an amazing experience.
Have you thought about what your life would have been like in that period in your mid teens had it not been for that school.
Yeah, I haven't thought much about that. It would have been pretty different.
And then you got to Oxford and you did actually subject pretty close to what my son is doing there right now. He's doing theology. You did philosophy and theology, and then tragedy cle to my ears as a parent, you dropped out.
Yeah, well, I was very frustrated and eager to change the world and get stuff done, and so I actually dropped out. And I helped to start a telephone counseling service for young British Muslims called Muslim Youth Helpline, which I worked on for two or three years as a volunteer.
And it was a secular peer to peer listing service for young British Muslims that post nine to eleven were dealing with a lot of I guess identity crisis would be the way that we would describe it in hindsight, but at the time it was just like, you know, lack of connection to community, family, parents, a lot of bullying and so yeah, I worked on that pretty much full time for two or three years.
And had you experienced anti Muslim sentiment and hatred yourself at that time given the period we're talking about after nine to eleven.
A little bit, Yeah, I think it was more just not so much for me, but I think a lot of people felt that, you know, we weren't sort of British enough, and people were figuring out how to both live their cultural religious identities in the context of families that often were first generation, didn't really speak the language, didn't know how to navigate the system, and then this increased kind of skepticism that we were sort of mostly terrorists or whatever.
And I think that was just this general.
Kind of fear and exclusion, and actually most of the time that was dealt with by just having kind and supportive conversation and having somebody be available on the other end of a telephone.
Yeah, someone to talk to. I know the work of the helpline actually, so I know exactly the world that you're talking about. Did you think hard about dropping out of university and have you regretted it at any point?
Since I haven't regretted it, and I probably could have thought harder about it. My tutor did encourage me to like switch subjects or change college and actually had me go meet one of his friends in a different college to go and talk about doing history or PP. But that point I was just so full of energy and like eager to start things. I started a business at the same time, sort of PDAs into restaurants to try and do restaurant booking and stuff and doing their networking.
And so on.
It was our very early days of the internet, so it was a bit early, but I did that for about a year or two as well. I had too much energy, I think for sitting around thinking in the dreamy spires.
¶ "Decisions we make may have very lasting consequences"
Now Here you are in this circle of power, right, one of a small group of people who are making decisions on a technology that is already changing all our lives and will continue to do. So, how conscious are you of that power?
Very conscious?
I take it very seriously and it's a great responsibility. And you know, I think that this is a moment when decisions that we make may have very lasting consequences. And I read history and I look back at times, for example, in the social media revolution, where I think it was very clear that there were potential harms that
maybe fell on deaf fears for too long. Or I look back at you know, the electric car revolution that could have taken off way back in the twenties, or you know, you look at kind of smoking or oil. So 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. It's also very competitive, so there's obviously a lot of that dynamic too.
¶ Exploring the 'broligarchy'
Yeah. Do you recognize the term brolligarchy.
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 Marati, who's the XCTO of Opening Eyes, 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 it is all about a group of people, one of whom is clearly Elon Musk, another one who looks like Peter Teal or sounds like Peter Teal. And 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, whereas in five or six difference season. 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. I 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
¶ His view of Sam Altman and Open AI
you just to because you know these key players, can you describe some of them in one word? Like if I say to Sam Ortman, what word first comes into your mind?
Oh my god, Yeah, I guess courageous, because well, you know, he's obviously sort of growing his data center fleet very very aggressively.
He 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 open Ai. Is it a gamble? Is it not a given that it's going to pay off for them?
Well, I think that chat GPT 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 ten years. Their revenues are quite a long way from there, so they've got a long way to go. But they're very talented teams, so I've got every confidence they can do it.
Okay, So other descriptions, what word would use to describe demis Hesavis?
Yeah, 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.
Together and now your competitors.
Yeah, but we started off as very very close friends. We work together every day for ten years and I learned a lot from him, and have huge respect for him.
¶ Conversations with Demis Hassabis about Gemini 3
Do you still talk?
Yeah, we texted last night.
Actually I congratulated him on the Nano banana, Gemini three and five years of Alpha fold all in one week.
Have you tried out Gemini three because it is creating quite a lot of waves. Do you think it is better than chat GPT?
Ah, you know, they're kind of different.
It's definitely got more kind of niche skills that chat GPT doesn't have, and it's very fast. CHURCHIBT is very strong, So I wouldn't 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's actually amazing for vision. One of my favorite features is like pull out your phone and talk about the world with co Pilot in your hand, and it can see exactly what you're looking at and you can talk about it and get feedback opinions.
You might be shopping for furniture or clothes.
Yes, we're putting 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 you sort of 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. But yeah, probably different kind of set of values.
I have interviewed him. He ended up calling me an NPC. I guess that was probably a form of bulldozing.
Yeah, I mean that's probably a good example.
That sounds like exactly 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. Are it's not your world.
¶ "I'm sort of a centrist these days"
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. I 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 street lights 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.
The 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, And people shouldn't criticize that. That's like the process working. That's the regulator taking feedback, see 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. And I think
¶ AI containment and the role of government
that's a good thing.
Do you think Mustapha? 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. In fact, you said you wanted three different kinds of governance, regimes modeled on climate change and financial stability, and arms controlled 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 and I can 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. At 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 UKAI 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've 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, because now that you've got a revised agreement with open AI, you suddenly have the freedom to pursue AI independently. Help me understand how that relationship with open AI is going to work in future, because you've been collaborators Microsoft and open Air for a long time. Now you're also going to be competitors. How does that work.
¶ Microsoft's revised deal with OpenAI: "It is a shift for us"
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 open Ai was that it would then go and build AGI when they signed the agreements back in twenty nineteen, and 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 open Ai builds up until twenty
thirty two. But open Ai decided that they wanted to take on more compute and buy compute from other providers, and so they now have deals with soft Bank 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 eighteen months ago. That 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 two hundred and eighty billion dollars of revenue all major institutions in the world, and they need to be able to use RAI features and ORAI tools every single day. So you know, we're still been a general purpose AI development shop over the last eighteen 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.
¶ The talent war and 'Zuck's' pay packages
Does your relationship with OpenAI include not poaching each other's staff because we've just had another bit of evidence of the talent war 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 Deep Mind, We've got people from open Ai.
I mean is there's a lot of rotation. This is part of the industry.
So there's certainly no no poach agreements that would not be legal. People can go work for whoever they want to go work for, and I think that at this time in the industry, it's just very very competitive.
And does that mean that you are prepared to Oh and are you already matching the kinds of sums that Meta's been spending the one hundred to two hundred million dollar 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 deep Mind is that we were very selective. What I've been doing a 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. So 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 Zuckerbergelsuk as you call him, Would you rather he rethought that? Does it? 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 gigawat data center, which will probably cost him a couple.
Hundred billion dollars over the next two or three years.
And I think he said publicly to Trump that he's going to spend up of six hundred billion dollars in the next three years on data centers. And you know, luckily for Microsoft, like we have thirty three 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 party. So we've got a very very
good setup in that sense. We're kind of hedged against that risk.
¶ Circular deals in AI: "Watching it carefully"
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. You 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 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. I 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 eighteen months, and that's sort of natural. I 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 ninety percent 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've you know, you're still only in your early forties, so you've got a lot of remarkable achievements. But is there anything left undone or that you reflect on.
¶ "I really want to nail medical superintelligence"
Yeah, I really want to nail medical superintelligence. And you know, I started deep mind Health back in twenty fifteen, 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 round, 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 say to you, we can do this and this, you're saying, this is how I want to use it.
What 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 co Pilot. I mean, many people are using it for companionship, emotional support, therapy, making difficult life decisions.
Has given me high quality access to informations, giving me emotional support, and is helping keep me organized.
¶ Suleyman on using AI for emotional support
And so what do you mean helping you get emotional support?
So 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 co Pilot 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, and that is just like super helpful. I feel kind of refreshed after a conversation with I feel like I'd let go of something.
It's 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, they don't have to bother to all talking to others in their life in the same way because they've said it all and they've got what they need back.
Yeah.
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 like so, I think if anything is actually deep in 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 mom's very you know, she's a proud mum. She's very excited, and she uses co pilot. She used pie before this. If I went to see her three or four weeks ago and she was still using Pie and 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 you know, she'll scan a plant and talk about, you know, 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 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? What's the fud because I'm sure the UK would love to have you back.
¶ The UK lacks the "hustle culture" of Silicon Valley
I 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 is you know, you can great when you're when you're kind of a bit of a cynical English person, but when you get into the rhythm of it, it'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 if you're talking about failure in that way, you are braver about it or just you know, it's 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. You'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. All right now, do you
¶ AI news reporters: "We're exploring everything"
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, probably 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 I witness 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. I 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 economists 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 you've got a little bit longer, maybe six months. I'm kidding, are you?
I'm not sure you are?
I am kidding. Is we had to be plenty for we are a very very long time.
It's really long time to get it perfect, you know, I mean, this was this was exceptional the first.
Thank you very much for talking to us.
Thank you very much for Chelle. This was a lot of fun.
And that's the Michelle Hussein 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 Michelle's show at Bloomberg dot 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 dot com slash Weekend.
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Until next time, goodbye,