Mustafa Suleyman | |
---|---|
Born | August 1984 (age 40) |
Nationality | British |
Education | Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet |
Alma mater | University of Oxford (dropped out) |
Occupation | Entrepreneur |
Known for | Artificial intelligence |
Mustafa Suleyman CBE (born August 1984 [1] ) is a British artificial intelligence (AI) entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Microsoft AI, and the co-founder and former head of applied AI at DeepMind, an AI company acquired by Google. [2] [3] After leaving DeepMind, he co-founded Inflection AI, a machine learning and generative AI company, in 2022. [4] [5]
Suleyman's Syrian father was working as a taxi driver and his English mother as a nurse. [6] He grew up off Caledonian Road, London, where he lived with his parents and his two younger brothers. [7]
Suleyman went to Thornhill Primary School, a state school in Islington, followed by Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, a boys' grammar school. [7] Around that time, he met his DeepMind co-founder, Demis Hassabis, through his best friend, Demis's younger brother. Suleyman shared that he and Hassabis would discuss how they could make a positive impact on the world. [6] Suleyman enrolled at the University of Oxford where he was an undergraduate student at Mansfield College, Oxford, before dropping out at 19. [7]
In August 2001, while still a teenager and despite being an atheist, [8] Suleyman helped a university friend establish a telephone counselling service called the Muslim Youth Helpline. [9] [10] [7] The organization would later become one of the largest mental health support services.
Suleyman subsequently worked as a policy officer on human rights for Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, before going on to start Reos Partners, a ‘systemic change’ consultancy that uses methods from conflict resolution to navigate social problems. As a negotiator and facilitator, Mustafa worked for a wide range of clients such as the United Nations, the Dutch government, and the World Wide Fund for Nature. [11] [12]
In 2010 Suleyman co-founded DeepMind Technologies, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning company, and became its chief product officer. The company quickly established itself as one of the leaders in the AI sector and was backed by Founders Fund, [13] Elon Musk and Scott Banister, [14] among others.
In 2014 DeepMind was acquired by Google for a reported £400 million, the company's largest acquisition in Europe at that time. [15] Following the acquisition, Suleyman became head of applied AI at DeepMind, taking on responsibility for integrating the company's technology across a wide range of Google products. [12]
In February 2016 Suleyman launched DeepMind Health [16] at the Royal Society of Medicine. DeepMind Health builds clinician-led technology for the National Health Service (NHS) and other partners to improve frontline healthcare services. [17] Under Suleyman, DeepMind also developed research collaborations with healthcare organizations in the United Kingdom, including Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS foundation trust. [18]
In 2016, Suleyman led an effort to apply DeepMind's machine learning algorithms to help reduce the energy required to cool Google's data centres. The system evaluated the billions of possible combinations of actions that the data centre operators could take, and came up with recommendations based on the predicted power usage. The system discovered novel methods of cooling, leading to a reduction of up to 40% of the amount of energy used for cooling, and a 15% improvement in the buildings' overall energy efficiency. [19]
Since June 2019, Suleyman has served on the board of The Economist Group, which publishes The Economist newspaper. [20] [21]
In August 2019, Suleyman was placed on administrative leave following allegations of bullying employees. [22] [23] The company hired an external lawyer to investigate, and shortly thereafter Suleyman left to take a VP role at parent company Google. An email circulated by DeepMind's leadership to staff after the story broke, as well as additional details published by Business Insider , said Suleyman's "management style fell short" of expected standards. [24] [25]
In December 2019, Suleyman announced he would be leaving DeepMind to join Google, working in a policy role. [26]
Suleyman left Google in January 2022 and joined Greylock Partners as a venture partner [27] and in March 2022, Suleyman co-founded Inflection AI, a new AI lab venture with Greylock's Reid Hoffman. [28] The company was founded with the goal of leveraging "AI to help humans 'talk' to computers," recruited former staff from companies such as Google and Meta and raised $225 million in its first funding round. [29] [28]
In 2023, Inflection AI launched a chatbot named “Pi” for Personal Intelligence. The bot “remembers” past conversations and seems to get to know its users over time. [30] According to Suleyman, the long-term goal for Pi is to be a digital “Chief of Staff”, with the initial design focused on maintaining conversational dialogue with users, asking questions, and offering emotional support. [31] [32]
In March 2024, Microsoft appointed Suleyman as Executive Vice President (EVP) and CEO of its newly created consumer AI unit, Microsoft AI. [33] Several members of Inflection AI's team were also appointed to the division, including co-founder Karen Simonyan.
Suleyman was appointed a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours. Suleyman was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence in 2023 [34] and in 2024. [35]
Suleyman is prominent in the debate over the ethics of AI [36] and has spoken widely about the need for companies, governments and civil society to join in holding technologists accountable for the impacts of their work. [37] He has advocated redesigning incentives in the technology industry to steer business leaders toward prioritising social responsibility alongside their fiduciary duties. [38] Within DeepMind he set up a research unit called DeepMind Ethics & Society to study the real-world impacts of AI and help technologists put ethics into practice. [39]
Suleyman is also a founding co-chair [40] of the Partnership on AI [41] – an organisation that includes representatives from companies such as Amazon, Apple, DeepMind, Meta, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. The organisation studies and formulates best practices for AI technologies, advances the public's understanding of AI, and serves as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and how it affects people and society. Its board of directors has equal representation from non-profit and for profit entities. [42]
In September 2023, Suleyman, in collaboration with researcher Michael Bhaskar, published The Coming Wave, Technology, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma, a book that examines the transformative and potentially perilous impact of advanced technologies, particularly AI and synthetic biology. According to Suleyman, AI notably has the potential to bring "radical abundance", address climate change and empower people with its cheap problem-solving capabilities. But it may also improve its own design and manufacturing processes, leading to a period of dangerously rapid AI progress. And it could enable catastrophic misuse, from bioengineered pathogens to autonomous weapons, making global oversight and containment essential to avoid unintended consequences. [8] It was shortlisted for the 2023 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. [43]
In June 2024, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Suleyman expressed the view that unless a website explicitly specifies otherwise, for "content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding." The statement sparked controversy over the use of Internet data for training AI models. [44] [45]
As of 2017, Suleyman resided in Peckham with his fiancée. A Business Insider profile in 2017 described Suleyman as being on the political left. [46]
A chatbot is a software application or web interface designed to have textual or spoken conversations. Modern chatbots are typically online and use generative artificial intelligence systems that are capable of maintaining a conversation with a user in natural language and simulating the way a human would behave as a conversational partner. Such chatbots often use deep learning and natural language processing, but simpler chatbots have existed for decades.
Suleyman or Süleyman is a variant of Suleiman. It means 'man of peace'. Notable people with the name include:
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. This contrasts with narrow AI, which is limited to specific tasks. Artificial superintelligence (ASI), on the other hand, refers to AGI that greatly exceeds human cognitive capabilities. AGI is considered one of the definitions of strong AI.
Jaan Tallinn is an Estonian billionaire computer programmer and investor known for his participation in the development of Skype and file-sharing application FastTrack/Kazaa.
Sir Demis Hassabis is a British artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Adviser. In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions for protein structure prediction.
Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is also chairman of venture capital firm Village Global and a co-founder of Inflection AI.
DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Google in 2014 and merged with Google AI's Google Brain division to become Google DeepMind in April 2023. The company is based in London, with research centres in Canada, France, Germany, and the United States.
OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its stated mission is to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.
Shane Legg is a machine learning researcher and entrepreneur. With Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, he cofounded DeepMind Technologies, and works there as the chief AGI scientist. He is also known for his academic work on artificial general intelligence, including his thesis supervised by Marcus Hutter.
Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, otherwise known as Partnership on AI, is a nonprofit coalition committed to the responsible use of artificial intelligence. Coming into inception in September 2016, PAI grouped together members from over 90 companies and non-profits in order to explore best practice recommendations for the tech community.
Google AI is a division of Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. It was announced at Google I/O 2017 by CEO Sundar Pichai.
Isomorphic Labs Limited is a London-based company which uses artificial intelligence for drug discovery. Isomorphic Labs was founded by Demis Hassabis, who also serves as the CEO. The company was incorporated on February 24, 2021 and announced on November 4, 2021. It was established under Alphabet Inc. as a spin-off from its AI research lab DeepMind, of which Hassabis is also founder and CEO.
LaMDA is a family of conversational large language models developed by Google. Originally developed and introduced as Meena in 2020, the first-generation LaMDA was announced during the 2021 Google I/O keynote, while the second generation was announced the following year.
ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in 2022. It is currently based on the GPT-4o large language model (LLM). ChatGPT can generate human-like conversational responses and enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. It is credited with accelerating the AI boom, which has led to ongoing rapid investment in and public attention to the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Some observers have raised concern about the potential of ChatGPT and similar programs to displace human intelligence, enable plagiarism, or fuel misinformation.
The AI boom is an ongoing period of rapid progress in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) that started in the late 2010s before gaining international prominence in the early 2020s. Examples include protein folding prediction led by Google DeepMind as well as large language models and generative AI applications developed by OpenAI. This period is sometimes referred to as an AI spring, to contrast it with previous AI winters.
Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google. Based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name, it was launched in 2023 after being developed as a direct response to the rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT. It was previously based on PaLM, and initially the LaMDA family of large language models.
Inflection AI, Inc. is an American technology company which has developed machine learning and generative artificial intelligence hardware and apps, founded in 2022. The company is structured as a public benefit corporation and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
Gemini is a family of multimodal large language models developed by Google DeepMind, serving as the successor to LaMDA and PaLM 2. Comprising Gemini Ultra, Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Gemini Nano, it was announced on December 6, 2023, positioned as a competitor to OpenAI's GPT-4. It powers the chatbot of the same name.