Transcription
The stakes are becoming ever higher in the global AI race. Companies are spending vast sums on deals of all kinds, including data centers and people. The biggest brains in the field can now reportedly command pay packages of up to $200 million.
Leading AI for one of the biggest companies of all, Microsoft, is Mustafa Suleyman. He's now trying to give Microsoft's AI autonomous capability and is also thinking about the next frontier, which he says is superintelligence. You'll hear him explain all of that to me. But as ever on The Mishal Husain Show, this conversation is about the person as well as the work. Mustafa Suleyman, thank you for being with us.
Thank you for having me, Mishal. I'd love to start by getting your insight into a world which is your everyday world, but which is still developing for most of us. And to understand what are the uses of AI that are in your life that the rest of us might not be using yet.
It's funny you ask, because yesterday night I stayed up far too late watching a film and afterwards I added to my a table that I've made in Copilot, 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, now 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, like the more obscure, the more creative, the more challenging you think the task is that you're going to ask, you know, your AI or Copilot 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 Copilot, 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 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 that have created problems for you, bought 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 just it's one of those things with technology, you know, it promises so much and it's always sort of just around the corner. You know, I remember like the allure of getting a a Discman. And I had this dream that I was going to be, you know, back in the 90s, like rollerblading down the street. And then I got one and obviously it didn't have any kind of vibration proof, you know, shock proof technology. And so it would skip every time, like I turned it on its side or tried to, you know, 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 everyday.
And I guess that given everything you've seen, you're one of the founders of DeepMind 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 you have faith, You don't get frustrated because you remember the moment when back in 2016, when your AI model beat the world champion at Go, which was a huge moment for AI.
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm very stoic about these things. Like, I know that it's going to work in the next six months or 12 months or maybe the worst case, 18 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. I mean, 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?
Yeah, I'm, I'm, 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 a 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?
I mean, superintelligence in the industry today means an AI system that can learn any new task and perform better than all humans 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 contain and so limit its capabilities and align, so 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 align 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 of the box. And I think that that's an obvious thing to say. Like that feels like, you know, a statement of fact, like everybody should agree to that. And yet, you know, 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 Microsoft distinctive by saying we will always use it through a humanist lens?
Yes, that is our position. You know, Microsoft is a company that has been around for 50 years. It is very careful as highly trusted 90% of the S&P 500 users to provide email and operating systems and every day productivity tools, which are now among the best in the world with Copilot. 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 superintelligence is is part of that program.
So what does that mean for your rivals in that field, some of whom you work closely with, like OpenAI, 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 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, you know, sort of 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. I think that's obvious.
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 are necessary prerequisites, they're red lines and I think everybody in the industry has to sign up to that idea. I mean, nobody wants to cause mass harm. I mean, fundamentally, even though we all disagree and clearly everybody is committed to, you know, the survival of our species and, you know, the kind of, I would hope, the kind of flourishing and wellbeing of everybody. So, you know, that's the discussion that we're trying to push now and and require everybody to ask themselves in the industry, you know, are they building a humanist superintelligence? Does it really stand for for people and for our species first?
Yeah. I'm just wondering how much confidence we can really have in that, given that things do go wrong. And I don't just mean I mean humans do wrong things or 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. 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, is like often it's actually quite expensive to run, you know, medical intervention tests before you get to a diagnosis. And often they can be unnecessary too, and they take time. And then in that process, you know, the condition can can often worsen. 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 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 18 months now. Superintelligence 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 an NHS nurse and you know, I am just a big believer that technology is here to serve us, like it should, you know, make our lives better, should make us more comfortable. You know, one day I think it is going to help us to live longer. I think it's going to, you know, 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's why, you know, even back at DeepMind, 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 it is inevitable that at some point over the next 20 or 30 years, machines are going to be more capable than humans at 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, you know, 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. I mean, we already live in a world of abundance. It's just poorly distributed. We already have more calories to consume. We have 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 and that's actually great news because that can proliferate. It can spread extremely quickly around the entire world. I mean, these are LLMs and chatbots have been the fastest spreading technology in history. I mean, you know, basically 2 billion annual 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. I think the challenge we're going to have to figure out is how we tax and redistribute so that the transition is a healthy one.
Tell me more about where these ideas and your beliefs came from or come from. Your, your mother was a nurse, but the family you grew up in, in London in the 1980s and 1990s, how would you describe it?
Pretty working class. Yeah. My dad was a was a mini cab driver and yeah my mum worked in the NHS. And yeah, I mean, we were, you know, fairly regular, like kind of unremarkable, like my parents didn't super value you know, education stuff. They always thought I should go get a trade. And my mum would often say to me, you know, you should be a carpenter or electrician, you know, leaves for 16 and stuff. And yeah, so I don't know. It comes from a place of just experiencing, you know, 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 16, Mustafa? Because I read that when your parents split up, you and your brother, your younger brother, were pretty much left to fend for themselves.
That's true, yeah. I don't know where you hear that, but, yeah. Me and my younger brother did live on our own for a few years. Yeah. Yeah.
I think you. 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, and I didn't really notice it at the time. You know, we were, you know, we had everything that we needed and it worked out pretty well.
And this is at 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, you know, great teachers and good, good mentors and I went to a very good school. You could do exams to get in. So I studied really hard when I was ten years old for the entrance exams and it was essentially like going to a private school. I mean, it was it was 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, pretty different.
And then you got to Oxford and you did actually a subject pretty close to what my son is doing there right now. He's doing theology. You did philosophy and theology. And then tragically to my ears as a parent, you dropped out.
Yeah. 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 counselling 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, non-religious, non directional, non-judgmental, just peer to peer listening service for for young British Muslims that post-9/11 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 like connection to community, family, parents, a lot of bullying and so on and so forth. 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, given the period we're talking about after 9/11?
A little bit, yeah. I mean, I think that it was more just not so much 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 like 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 the slight increase kind of skepticism that we were, you know, sort of mostly terrorists or whatever. And I think there was just this like general kind of, you know, fear and exclusion. And and actually most of the time, you know, 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, I know exactly the world that you're talking about. Did 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, my tutor did encourage me to, like, switch subjects or change college and and actually had me go meet one of his friends at a different college to go and talk about doing history or PPE. But I think at that point I was just so full of energy and like eager to start things. I started a business at the same time doing electronic point of sale, selling, you know, sort of PDAs into restaurants to try and do restaurant booking and stuff and doing their networking and and so on. It was a very early days of the internet, so it was a bit early, but I did that for about a year or two as well. So I was just like I had too much energy, I think, for sitting around thinking in the dreamy spires.
Well, you found you found the outlets for it because then of course, you went on to co-found DeepMind with Demis Hassabis.
Yeah.
And 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 if 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, you know, times, for example, in the social media revolution where I think there was it was very clear that there were potential harms that maybe fell on deaf ears for too long. Or I look back at, you know, the electric car revolution that could have taken off way back in the 20s or, you know, you look at the kind of smoking or oil. So I'm very sensitive to those things because it's very clear that, like these things will cause harm. And, you know, 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 I think there's definitely a group of the CEOs, obviously, Sam and Dario from Anthropic were co-founders, me and Demis were co-founders. You know, so we all know each other very, very well. And I think on the whole, you know, I think 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.
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, is 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 Jessie 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 Thiel or sounds like Peter Thiel. And it's it's well, I recommended it, we interviewed him not long ago here. But, 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, you know, just staggering to get out of the bubble and see how this technology is being developed on, you know, 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, you know, pretty carefully about it as well. So it's impressive. And I think just yeah, I also come back to London a lot and make sure that I spend time outside of Silicon Valley.
Yeah. So if you have a different impression to someone like Jessie Armstrong or 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. Yeah, I guess courageous.
Because?
Well, you know, he's obviously sort of growing his data center fleet very, very aggressively. And I think he's you know, he may well turn out to be, you know, one of the one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation. But, you know, he's he's certainly achieved a lot. And I think now he's 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 is it a gamble? Is it not a given that it's going to pay off for them?
Well, like 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 .5 trillion dollars of commitments for building data centers over the next five or ten years. And, you know, they their revenues are quite a long way from there. So, you know, they've they've got a long way to go, but they're very talented team, so I've got every confidence they can do it.
So other descriptions, what word would you use to describe Demis Hassabis?
Yeah, probably a great scientist. I mean, I think he's he's a great thinker. And, you know, he's he's a good polymath. He's, you know, made massive contributions in the field multiple times. And so, you know, I think he's truly exceptional.
You were, of course, you know, you worked together and now you're competitors.
Yeah, but we started off as very, very close friends. And so, you know, we worked together every day for ten years. And, you know, I learnt a lot from him and, you know, 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 AlphaFold all in one week.
Yeah. Have you tried out Gemini 3? Because it's, it is creating quite a lot of waves. It's good. Do you think it is better than ChatGPT?
You know, they're kind of different. It's, it's definitely got you know, sort of, it's definitely got sort of, you know, more kind of niche skills that ChatGPT doesn't have and it's very fast. But ChatGPT is very strong. So I wouldn't I wouldn't go that far.
Okay, is it better than Copilot?
It can do things the 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 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. You might be shopping for furniture or clothes, you know, and I think that we are really trying to imagine I mean, 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 you sort of help unblock you whenever you get stuck with something.
I'm only going to do one more of these. Like, how would you describe a key person in the industry? But it's Elon Musk. How would you describe him?
I guess, as a bulldozer. I mean, he's 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, probably different kind of set of values.
I have interviewed him. Yes. He ended 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 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, 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 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, you know, emissions regulations and streetlights and, you know, you know, 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, you know, not in a mode where there is huge catastrophic harm. I think the industry's 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. And 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. I mean, I think, for example, some of the regulations that have been proposed in Europe are currently in talks to be wound back with the EU AI Act. And, you know, I think that's good. People shouldn't criticize that. That's like the process working. That's the regulator taking feedback, seeing how things work in practice. I think that should be celebrated and, you know, but at the same time, you know, they have to be able to have the freedom to experiment and try new regulation. 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. In fact, you said like you wanted three different kinds of governance regimes modelled on climate change and financial stability and arms control that 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?
No, I'm still calling for those things. We should have a financial stability board for AI. We should have, you know, a climate process, an ICAN which basically goes and, you know, audits the progress that we're making. You know, 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 UK AI Safety Institute. So, yeah, I don't mean to say that we don't need it. I'm saying that these are such like long term effects and these governance processes take so long to build that we've basically got to to start now. But what we don't need is a knee-jerk reaction. We don't need some panicked, you know, sort of, you know, overreaction because that would cause a different set of problems.
Yeah. And the superintelligence work you're doing and indeed, you know, everything that you're doing in AI at the moment, you're in a new phase, aren't you? Because 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?
Yeah, I mean, it's a sort of complicated set up 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. And in return, Microsoft would build the AI infrastructure, the chips and the data centers and so on and so forth. And Microsoft would get, in return for 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. But we're now hiring out a superintelligence team and pursuing our own, you know, 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, you know, all major institutions in the world. And they need to be able to use our AI features and our AI tools every single day. 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, so it is a shift for us.
And does your relationship with OpenAI include not poaching eachother'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 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. I mean, we got people from OpenAI. I mean, 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. And, you know, 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. I think all of that's to be expected.
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. I think that, you know, Zuck's taken a particular approach that like involves, you know, 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 and we've you know, 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. 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.
And would you rather he, Mark Zuckerberg or Zuck, 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. I mean, he's he's 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. And I think he said publicly to Trump that he's going to spend upwards of $600 billion in the next three years on on data centers. And, you know, luckily for Microsoft, 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? You know, you are an investor in OpenAI, 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. You know, like 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, you know, 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.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's true and everything has concentrated even more around Silicon Valley in the last 18 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, you know, the cost of production is also going through the floor. So, you know, 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 know, you don't get curves that fall that quickly in any other 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.
Okay. So is there anything you look back on now that you would have 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 would do that you reflect on?
Yeah, I think that 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, you know, 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 and, you know, developing new compounds for renewables and so on. I think that AI will really transform the energy industry. So, you know, that's those are my two sort of big focuses, I think.
And is that what your days like that when the engineers, your team are saying to you we can do this and this, you're you're saying this is how I want to use it?
Yeah, I think what was what we're always focused on is can we build general purpose models that are as smart as humans as 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 uses, the use cases in Copilot. I mean, many people are using it for companionship, emotional support, therapy, making difficult life decisions. It has given me high quality access to information, it's given me emotional support and it's helping keep me organized. 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 Copilot about something that was tricky in my day or something that I felt frustrated about. Yeah, I mean, maybe emotional support is 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. The co-pilot 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 and 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, 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? Like you download in that way. People go home and maybe they don't have to, 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.
Yeah. Or the flipside is they don't have to take it out on their partner or their best friends. I still call my best friends, you know, every weekend and have a good old chat like so I think if anything, it's actually deepened some of my relationships with my friends. Like 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, you know, how 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 Pi, and I was like that's amazing.
Which is what you founded at Inflection, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And 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 like, you know, 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.
Yeah, I mean, I would have loved to have started Inflection in the UK and I would love to like I love the UK, I love London and obviously I'm very British in mentality. But one of the things I don't like is the tall poppy syndrome and 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 you know, there's not enough of a kind of celebration of, of, of yeah, 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, it can grate when you when you're kind of a bit of a cynical English person, but when you get into the rhythm of it is 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 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. Like it's quite humbling to see everybody just on the make, like trying to understand some new technology, you know, random, non-technical people reading science papers. Every time, like, you know, in a Starbucks or whatever, there'll be someone on their laptop watching a machine learning video. You know, you'll be reading a book in a coffee shop and you'll overhear two people who don't know each other, but just like a kind of networking almost. And there's just, you know, just trying 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 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, you know, 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. You know, one of the things I'm very excited about is how, you know, AI news reporters can reinvigorate local news. So imagine that there are hundreds of thousands of 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, you know, factually reliable information. So 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 MSN?
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 you've got a little bit longer, maybe six months.
You know. 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 Suleyman, thank you very much for talking to us.
Thank you very much, Mishal. This was a lot of fun.