Mustafa Suleyman
In plain wordsA British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and Inflection AI, leads Microsoft's effort to build its own advanced AI models, and has written about the difficulty of containing powerful AI.
British entrepreneur, appointed chief executive of Microsoft AI in March 2024. After leaving the University of Oxford he co-founded a telephone helpline for young Muslims and worked in conflict resolution, then co-founded DeepMindDeepMind, prop. n.: A London artificial intelligence company, bought by Google in 2014, famous for programs that mastered the game of Go and predicted the shapes of proteins. In 2023 it merged into Google DeepMind. in 2010 with Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis, prop. n.: A British AI researcher and former chess prodigy who co-founded DeepMind, led the teams behind AlphaGo and AlphaFold, and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. and Shane LeggShane Legg, prop. n.: A New Zealand-born AI researcher who co-founded DeepMind and helped make 'artificial general intelligence' a mainstream term and goal., leading its applied AI work, including DeepMind Health and data-center energy optimization. He moved to Google in 2019 as a vice president for AI product management and policy, and in 2022 co-founded Inflection AIInflection AI, prop. n.: An AI company founded in 2022 that made Pi, a friendly personal chatbot. In 2024 its leaders and most of its staff left to join Microsoft. with Reid Hoffman and Karén Simonyan, maker of the chatbot Pi. Microsoft hired him and most of Inflection's staff in 2024 to lead its consumer AI products, including the Copilot assistant; in March 2026 Copilot passed to another executive so that he could concentrate on building Microsoft's own frontier models. His book 'The Coming Wave' (2023, with Michael Bhaskar) argues that containing AI and synthetic biology is the central challenge of the century. In 2025 he warned against building seemingly conscious AIseemingly conscious AI, n.: An AI that gives such a convincing impression of having feelings and a self that people believe it is conscious, whether or not it actually is. and launched a Microsoft team to pursue what he calls humanist superintelligencehumanist superintelligence, n.: Microsoft AI's name for very advanced AI that is deliberately kept limited, controllable and aimed at specific human problems such as medicine and energy, rather than all-powerful general systems..
Related
- DeepMindDeepMind, prop. n.: A London artificial intelligence company, bought by Google in 2014, famous for programs that mastered the game of Go and predicted the shapes of proteins. In 2023 it merged into Google DeepMind.
- Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis, prop. n.: A British AI researcher and former chess prodigy who co-founded DeepMind, led the teams behind AlphaGo and AlphaFold, and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- Shane LeggShane Legg, prop. n.: A New Zealand-born AI researcher who co-founded DeepMind and helped make 'artificial general intelligence' a mainstream term and goal.
- AI companionAI companion, n.: A chatbot designed to be a friend, partner or confidant rather than a tool: it remembers you, has a personality and keeps up an ongoing relationship.
- AI welfareAI welfare, n.: Concern for the well-being of AI systems themselves, in case some of them can suffer or have interests that matter — and the research into how to tell and what to do about it.
- superintelligencesuperintelligence, n.: A mind, usually imagined as an AI, that would leave even the cleverest people far behind in nearly every kind of thinking, not just in one game or skill. None is known to exist.
Sources
- Suleyman, M. & Bhaskar, M. (2023). The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma. Crown.
Mentioned in
Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis, prop. n.: A British AI researcher and former chess prodigy who co-founded DeepMind, led the teams behind AlphaGo and AlphaFold, and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry., DeepMindDeepMind, prop. n.: A London artificial intelligence company, bought by Google in 2014, famous for programs that mastered the game of Go and predicted the shapes of proteins. In 2023 it merged into Google DeepMind., Microsoft ResearchMicrosoft Research, prop. n.: Microsoft's research division, with laboratories on several continents, whose scientists have produced influential work on speech, vision and language AI., Shane LeggShane Legg, prop. n.: A New Zealand-born AI researcher who co-founded DeepMind and helped make 'artificial general intelligence' a mainstream term and goal., humanist superintelligencehumanist superintelligence, n.: Microsoft AI's name for very advanced AI that is deliberately kept limited, controllable and aimed at specific human problems such as medicine and energy, rather than all-powerful general systems., Inflection AIInflection AI, prop. n.: An AI company founded in 2022 that made Pi, a friendly personal chatbot. In 2024 its leaders and most of its staff left to join Microsoft.