Mustafa Suleyman: How the Microsoft AI CEO Thinks

**Rob Kelly** (0:02)
I'm Rob Kelly, and this is Media and the Machine, a show about the biggest technology shift of our lifetime and how to profit from it. Each week, I talk with the founders and CEOs closest to AI and content, the ones figuring this out in real time. I'm also building an AI content business myself, and share lessons of what I learned along the way.
You know, life's funny. I began my career lucky enough to interview leaders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Then I went on to be a three-time founder and CEO, driving $100 million plus in revenue and some failures too. Now I'm back at the table interviewing this new world's current and future leaders.
This isn't only a business story, it's a human one. So every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation. We'll figure this out together from the inside. Welcome to Media and the Machine.
There are only a handful of people in the world truly leading the AI race, and I want to understand the humans behind the hype. People like Sam Altman at OpenAI, Dario Amodei at Anthropic, Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman at Microsoft AI, and Elon Musk through XAI. The leaders behind the companies building the models, buying the chips, and shaping the rules of AI. So every few episodes, I'm going to profile one of these AI leaders through the best book biography I can find. Where did they come from? What do they believe? What kind of future are they trying to build? After all, their decisions are shaping the future of business and humanity. Here's my summary of The Coming Wave biography by Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI.
A little background on Mustafa. He was DeepMind co-founder along with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legge. DeepMind famously bought by Google. He was an Inflection co-founder and CEO. Microsoft came in, did a big deal, paid around a billion dollars for the team at Inflection and a license to Inflections Technology, served an acqua hire even though they called it a licensing deal, somewhere in between. One thing I think about Mustafa that I really like and think is important is he's more worldly than your average entrepreneur. He's British born, raised in London, he's got a Syrian father, English mother. Not your normal startup guy or gal. His first three jobs, for instance, Muslim youth helpline, mental health support to young Muslims. He was a policy officer at London City Hall working in the government. He worked on conflict resolution for a firm called Rios Partners. I don't know a lot about them, but they basically resolve global conflicts involving hundreds of regions, countries around the globe. Just overall, a worldly, different kind of background and a do-good sort of upbringing too, you could say.
But now he's at Microsoft, a highly capitalist company, and I think that mix is really fascinating. One of the reasons I wanted to share my highlights from this book, The Coming Wave. So a couple of things. First off, by wave, he means technology. So he does a nice primer on the biggest technologies in history, stone tools, fire, language, agriculture, writing. I'm going to skip through that. You could find that in a lot of other history of innovation types of books. But I thought I would start with a quote here about his view of technology and a wave, which is, Technology is an eternally dangling carrot, Constantly promising more, better, easier, cheaper. Our appetite for invention is insatiable. The seeming inevitability of waves comes not from the absence of resistance, but from demand overwhelming it.
And with that, I thought I'm going to dive into the AlphaGo story, even though it's been documented, including, I rank AlphaGo the documentary, the number one documentary in the best AI documentaries, which I wrote about. You can look up on Media and the Machine and also dailydoc.com, a newsletter blog on great documentaries. So it's the best AI documentaries. Go search that, you'll find the article. And I want to give you some background just on AlphaGo, because he was there. It gives you a sense of his perspective, and also the impact of this AI wave. So I'm reading right from the book here. Even days before its first public competition in March 2016, prominent researchers thought that AI simply couldn't win at this level of go. At DeepMind, again, DeepMind acquired by Google, we were still uncertain our program would prevail in a match up with a master human competitor. Within the AI community, it represented a first high profile public test of deep reinforcement learning and one of the first research uses of a very large cluster of GPU computation. We all know later on how important GPUs and computing power became. In the press, the match up between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol was presented as an epic battle, human versus machine, humanity's best and brightest against the cold lifeless force of a computer, to all the tired tropes of terminators and robot overlords. But under the surface, another more important dimension is becoming clear, a tension I dimly worried about ahead of the contest. AlphaGo wasn't just human versus machine. As Lee Sedol squared up against AlphaGo, DeepMind was represented by the Union Jack. That's the British flag, for those who don't know. While the Sedol camp flew the Taegukki, I think I'm getting that right, that's the pronunciation of the South Korean unmistakable flag. This was West versus East. The implication of national rivalry was an aspect of the contest I soon came to regret. I'll go on reading here. It's hard to overstate how popular the competition was in Asia. In the West, the proceedings were followed by some hardcore AI enthusiasts. Remember, this is pre-Chat GPT. So it's fascinating, by far, almost everyone in the world who watched this was outside the US, and maybe 1% was from the US. It was a significant moment in tech history. So ironic, even though it was a significant moment, way more people outside the US reading about it. Across Asia, the event was bigger than the Super Bowl. More than 280 million people watched live. We'd taken over an entire hotel in Souls downtown, mobbed by ever-present members of the local and international media. You could hardly move for hundreds of photographers and TV cameras. The intensity was unlike anything I'd experienced before, a level of scrutiny and hype that seemed alien in what was, to Western observers, an obscure game for math enthusiasts. AI developers, suffice to say, were not used to this. In Asia, it wasn't just the geeks watching, it was everyone. Soon became clear that the observers, including tech companies, governments and militaries, the results sent a shockwave through the mall. The significance was lost on no one. The challenger, a Western firm, London-based, American-owned had just marched into an ancient, iconic, cherished game, literally put its flag on the turf, and obliterated the home team. It was as if a group of Korean robots had shown up at Yankee Stadium and beat America's all-star baseball team.