, the most advanced AI research outfit in the world, I mention that I asked ChatGPT to come up with some questions for him. Mustafa Suleyman is mock-annoyed, because he’s currently developing his own chatbot, called Pi, and says I should have used that.
It’s not what I was expecting – AI as BFF – but it’s all the more startling because of what Suleyman has already told me about his background. Born in 1984 in north London to a Syrian father and English mother, he grew up in poverty and then, when he was 16, his parents separated and both moved abroad, leaving him and his little brother to fend for themselves. He later won a place at Oxford to study philosophy and theology, but dropped out after a year.
Me too. The Coming Wave distils what is about to happen in a forcefully clear way. AI, Suleyman argues, will rapidly reduce the price of achieving any goal. Its astonishing labour-saving and problem-solving capabilities will be available cheaply and to anyone who wants to use them. He memorably calls this “the plummeting cost of power”. If the printing press allowed ordinary people to own books, and the silicon chip put a computer in every home, AI will democratise simply doing things.
Second, there’s what Suleyman terms hyper-evolution: AI is capable of refining design and manufacturing processes, with the improvements compounding after each new iteration. It’s incredibly hard to keep up with this rate of change and make sure safeguards are in place. Lethal threats could emerge and spread before anyone has even clocked them.
He likes to think of himself as someone who confronts problems rather than rationalising them away. After he left Oxford he worked in policy for the then mayor of London Ken Livingstone, before helping NGOs arrive at a common position during the Copenhagen climate summit. It wasn’t until 2010 that he got into AI, creating DeepMind with the coding genius Demis Hassabis, the brother of a school friend, and becoming chief product officer.
For Suleyman, the only powers realistically capable of acting to contain AI are states, and despite the gallows humour, he’s deeply worried about how fragile they are becoming. This doesn’t seem very Silicon Valley, somehow, at least as represented by the likes of Ayn Randian radicals such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. “I mean, I couldn’t disagree more with their politics. I’m extremely against them, if I’m extreme about anything.