Two different stories based on the same person, Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.
First up, Deutsche-Welle, December 25:
Barely a year ago, few people had heard of Chat GPT, Bard and Llama — artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots that promised to make the world a lot more productive but would likely leave millions of people out of a job.
These AI assistants have since helped users around the world to generate content that would often take humans many more hours to achieve on their own. The huge layoffs threatened haven't happened, at least not yet.
Dozens of alternatives have sprung up over the past year, with some specializing in app coding, video and graphic content production, or music creation.
Chatbots help millions, but still limited
Despite the incredible power of so-called large language models upon which these chatbots run, critics say they are plagiarizing the internet to produce content that is often bland, contains factual errors or shows political or racial bias.Tesla founder Elon Musk has tried to address this with the beta launch of his AI assistant last month. Grok, as it's known, is billed as being a chatbot with "a sense of humor" and a "rebellious streak," although it's also been accused of political bias.
As the AI space grows ever more competitive with tens of billions of dollars being invested globally, tech industry luminaries are predicting where the technology will head next.
One of them, Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, believes that the future of AI assistants will be in their ability to interact with humans in an advanced manner.
"The third wave will be the interactive phase," Suleyman told MIT Technology Review in September. "That’s why I’ve bet for a long time that conversation is the future interface. You know, instead of just clicking on buttons and typing, you’re going to talk to your AI."
AI becomes less artificial
Interactive AI will allow humans to have a deeper conversation with their AI chatbot. Whereas systems like Amazon's Alexa respond to simple commands, the next generation of AI tools will be able to respond in a more human-like way.Suleyman said they will also be able to act on decisions by themselves, so users can give their assistant "a general, high-level goal, and it will use all the tools it has to act on that."
Interactive AI will talk to other people and other chatbots to achieve the goal set by the user.
The technology will also adapt to users' preferences and learn from user feedback, helping computers to function more like how humans work and think.
Companies will be able to use Interactive AI to improve customer services, guiding users through troubleshooting steps.
The technology will also help with sales and marketing and lead generation by offering personalized communication based on a customer's individual needs....
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We happened to have the Tech Review article in the queue for next week but with DW jumping the line here it is. With a word of warning up front: A lot of what Suleyman says seems sort of airy-fairy. The interview is at its best when the interviewer can nail him down e.g.
....Talking of your values and wanting to make the world better, why not share how you did this so that other people could improve their models too?
Well, because I’m also a pragmatist and I’m trying to make money. I’m trying to build a business. I’ve just raised $1.5 billion and I need to pay for those chips.
Look, the open-source ecosystem is on fire and doing an amazing job, and people are discovering similar tricks. I always assume that I’m only ever six months ahead.
Let’s bring it back to what you’re trying to achieve. Large language models are obviously the technology of the moment. But why else are you betting on them?
The first wave of AI was about classification. Deep learning showed that we can train a computer to classify various types of input data: images, video, audio, language. Now we’re in the generative wave, where you take that input data and produce new data.
The third wave will be the interactive phase. That’s why I’ve bet for a long time that conversation is the future interface. You know, instead of just clicking on buttons and typing, you’re going to talk to your AI.
And these AIs will be able to take actions. You will just give it a general, high-level goal and it will use all the tools it has to act on that. They’ll talk to other people, talk to other AIs. This is what we’re going to do with Pi.
That’s a huge shift in what technology can do. It’s a very, very profound moment in the history of technology that I think many people underestimate. Technology today is static. It does, roughly speaking, what you tell it to do....
Going back to the beginning of the interview, From MIT's Technology Review, September 15, 2023
DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman wants to build a chatbot that does a whole lot more than chat. In a recent conversation I had with him, he told me that generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI: bots that can carry out tasks you set for them by calling on other software and other people to get stuff done. He also calls for robust regulation—and doesn’t think that’ll be hard to achieve.
Suleyman is not the only one talking up a future filled with ever more autonomous software. But unlike most people he has a new billion-dollar company, Inflection, with a roster of top-tier talent plucked from DeepMind, Meta, and OpenAI, and—thanks to a deal with Nvidia—one of the biggest stockpiles of specialized AI hardware in the world. Suleyman has put his money—which he tells me he both isn't interested in and wants to make more of—where his mouth is.
Suleyman has had an unshaken faith in technology as a force for good at least since we first spoke in early 2016. He had just launched DeepMind Health and set up research collaborations with some of the UK’s state-run regional health-care providers.
The magazine I worked for at the time was about to publish an article claiming that DeepMind had failed to comply with data protection regulations when accessing records from some 1.6 million patients to set up those collaborations—a claim later backed up by a government investigation. Suleyman couldn’t see why we would publish a story that was hostile to his company’s efforts to improve health care. As long as he could remember, he told me at the time, he’d only wanted to do good in the world.
In the seven years since that call, Suleyman’s wide-eyed mission hasn’t shifted an inch. “The goal has never been anything but how to do good in the world,” he says via Zoom from his office in Palo Alto, where the British entrepreneur now spends most of his time.
Suleyman left DeepMind and moved to Google to lead a team working on AI policy. In 2022 he founded Inflection, one of the hottest new AI firms around, backed by $1.5 billion of investment from Microsoft, Nvidia, Bill Gates, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Earlier this year he released a ChatGPT rival called Pi, whose unique selling point (according to Suleyman) is that it is pleasant and polite. And he just coauthored a book about the future of AI with writer and researcher Michael Bhaskar, called The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma.
Many will scoff at Suleyman's brand of techno-optimism—even naïveté. Some of his claims about the success of online regulation feel way off the mark, for example. And yet he remains earnest and evangelical in his convictions.
It’s true that Suleyman has an unusual background for a tech multi-millionaire. When he was 19 he dropped out of university to set up Muslim Youth Helpline, a telephone counseling service. He also worked in local government. He says he brings many of the values that informed those efforts with him to Inflection. The difference is that now he just might be in a position to make the changes he’s always wanted to—for good or not.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your early career, with the youth helpline and local government work, was about as unglamorous and un–Silicon Valley as you can get. Clearly, that stuff matters to you. You’ve since spent 15 years in AI and this year cofounded your second billion-dollar AI company. Can you connect the dots?
I’ve always been interested in power, politics, and so on. You know, human rights principles are basically trade-offs, a constant ongoing negotiation between all these different conflicting tensions. I could see that humans were wrestling with that—we’re full of our own biases and blind spots. Activist work, local, national, international government, et cetera—it’s all just slow and inefficient and fallible.
Imagine if you didn’t have human fallibility. I think it’s possible to build AIs that truly reflect our best collective selves and will ultimately make better trade-offs, more consistently and more fairly, on our behalf.
And that’s still what motivates you?
I mean, of course, after DeepMind I never had to work again. I certainly didn’t have to write a book or anything like that. Money has never ever been the motivation. It’s always, you know, just been a side effect.
For me, the goal has never been anything but how to do good in the world and how to move the world forward in a healthy, satisfying way. Even back in 2009, when I started looking at getting into technology, I could see that AI represented a fair and accurate way to deliver services in the world....
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