Who is Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s new AI chief

Listen to the audio version of the article

Mustafa Suleyman has been hired as head of consumer AI at Microsoft. Suleyman, 39, former co-founder of Google’s DeepMind research laboratory, will report to CEO Satya Nadella. For the first time at Microsoft there will be a single leader in charge of artificial intelligence. The new division will group several products, such as Copilot, Bing, Edge and GenAI, into a single group, called Microsoft AI. Microsoft will also hire most of the employees of Inflection, a start-up founded by Suleyman already active in artificial intelligence. Microsoft shares rose 0.5% on the announcement.

“We want to make sure that the next wave is one where Microsoft can really, really create incredible products for the consumer,” Suleyman said. And in saying this he quoted the title “The coming wave. Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.”, the book he co-authored with Michael Bhaskar which received excellent reviews: «Fascinating, well written, important» (Yuval Noah Harari), «An excellent guide to navigate in unprecedented times” (Bill Gates). When talking about incredible products, perhaps it is good to remember what Suleyman said in an interview with Mit Technology Review, namely that generative artificial intelligence is only a phase. “The next step is interactive AI: bots that can perform set tasks by inviting other software and other people to perform tasks.”

Like Sam Altman, the British Suleyman says he wants to do the good of humanity and also says he is in favor of regulation despite those who do not believe in such techno-optimism which for some ends in naivety. Like Altman, and like many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, he abandoned his studies at a young age, precisely at 19, to create the Muslim Youth Helpline, a telephone counseling service, then worked for the local government and argued that many of those values ​​he brought with him to Inflection.

Suleyman also says that he has always been interested in politics, in power “even in human rights which are fundamentally exchanges, a constant negotiation between conflicting parties” and that by observing local, national and international governments he sees a lot of slowness, inefficiency and fallibility. «He Imagine if you didn’t have human fallibility. I think it’s possible to build AI that truly reflects our collective best selves and ultimately allows us to make better trade-offs, more consistently and more equitably.”

So much enthusiasm and so much interest in what goes beyond technology also makes him say that money was never the motivation but the side effect. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Inflection’s Pi chatbot was designed to mimic human understanding of emotions and interact with users in a way that supports them. However, despite attracting significant interest from investors, including Microsoft, and a million active daily users, the startup has failed to find an effective business model, Suleyman said.