Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman: Building AI Personality, OpenAI Relationship, Data Center Demand, AGI Timeline

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:00)
Microsoft has an upgraded, more personable AI bot that will remember you, help you organize your thoughts, and may even appear as an avatar. Why is it building it? And how will it get you to use it? Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is here and has some answers. That's coming up right after this.

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**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:03)
Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're joined today by Mustafa Suleyman. He's the CEO of Microsoft AI and a co-founder of DeepMind. And I'm so excited for this conversation because today, we're going to talk about the company's upgraded AI bot. How much AI has left to improve? Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI and what we might expect to get to AGI. So no lack of topics to cover. Mustafa, it's great to see you. Welcome to the show.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (1:34)
All the great questions. I'm super excited. Thanks for having me on the show and it's great to be here.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:39)
Great. So let's get right into the product news right off the bat. You have a number of product announcements you're making today as this show is coming out. And basically what this amounts to is building a more personalized companion. This is a vision you've had for a long time.
But this is starting to roll out and co-pilot. The upgrades that we're talking about is better memory, which I think is really interesting. So the bot is going to remember you actions like booking flight tickets or making a table reservation, a shopping assistant. And then, of course, you're teasing some sort of avatar play. So talk a little bit about how your vision for this more personalized co-pilot is starting to play out.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (2:19)
Yeah, you know, the amazing thing about the time that we're in is that we're actually transitioning from the end of the first phase of this new era of intelligence into the very beginning of the next phase. And what I mean by that is that over the last couple of years, we've all been blown away by the basic factual succinct Q&A style responses that these chatbots give us. And I think that that's awesome and has been incredible. You can think of that as I do as its IQ, it's basic smarts, and obviously, that's totally magical. And obviously, early adopters tend to be really, really focused on is it good at math and, you know, can it do coding really well and stuff like that. But the majority of consumers, I think, really care about its tone. They care, is it like polite and respectful? Is it occasionally funny in the right moments? Does it remember, you know, not just my name, but how to pronounce my name? And when I correct it, does it remember that correction? And that's actually a really hard problem. And so I think these subtle details make up its emotional intelligence. And I think that's what we're taking small steps towards today as we launch a bunch of new features around memory, personalization and actions.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (3:42)
So how long will the memory go back? Because to me, one of the more annoying things about using these bots is having to kind of tell it who I am at each time. And we know that OpenAI, for instance, has some memory baked in. It will remember things and bring it into new conversations. OpenAI, by the way, which we're talking at a moment where it just announced a $40 billion fundraise with Microsoft included as one of the funders. So we'll get to that in a bit. But we're talking about like these bots having memory. And how far back will your bot now go back? Well, I have to tell it like every couple of months who I am. Like I feel like I'm living in the notebook every time I'm trying to talk to one of these things.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (4:21)
Unfortunately, it's not going to be perfect, but it is a big, big step forward. So it's going to remember all the big facts about your life. You know, you may have told it that you're married, you have kids, that you grew up in a certain place, you went to school at a certain place. And so over time, it's going to start to build this kind of richer understanding of who you are, what you care about, what kind of style you like. What sort of answers you like, longer, shorter, bullets, conversational, more humorous. And so although it won't be absolutely perfect, it really will be quite a different experience. And I think it's the number one feature that I think is going to unlock a really different type of use. Because every time you go to it, you'll know that the investment that you made in the last session isn't wasted, and you're actually building on it time after time.