Mustafa Suleyman: The AGI Race Is Fake, Building Safe Superintelligence & the $1M Agentic Economy | EP #216

**Dave Blundin** (0:00)
What's the mandate from Satya? Is it win AGI?

**Mustafa Suleyman** (0:03)
I don't think there's really a winning of AGI. I'm not sure there's a race.

**Peter Diamandis** (0:07)
One of the OGs of the AI world, Mustafa Suleyman is the CEO now of Microsoft AI. He spent more than a decade at the forefront of this industry before we even had gotten to feel it in the past couple of years now.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (0:23)
Fundamentally, the transition that we're making is from a world of operating systems, search engines, apps and browsers to a world of agents and companions. We're all going as fast as we possibly can, but a race implies it's zero sum. It implies that there's a finish line. It is not quite the right metaphor. As we know, technologies and science and knowledge proliferates everywhere, all at once, to all scales, basically simultaneously.

**Peter Diamandis** (0:52)
Are you spending a lot of your energy, compute human power on safety?

**Mustafa Suleyman** (0:57)
Yeah, no, I mean...

**Dave Blundin** (1:00)
Now, that's the Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

**Peter Diamandis** (1:05)
Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with DB2 and AWG and Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, Inflection AI, and now the CEO of Microsoft AI. Welcome, my friend. It's good to have you here. Thank you for making time for us.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (1:21)
Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to do this.

**Peter Diamandis** (1:23)
Yeah, it's... You know, what you've been building with Satya is amazing, and it's hard to believe that Microsoft is 50 years old. It's reinvented itself so many times, and for the last five years, it's been, you know, at the top of the game, the most valuable company in the world. 250,000 employees, and from what I understand, 10,000 employees now under you. So a few, you know, important questions I want to open with. First, some broad context.
You're building inside a massive company with huge resources, probably arguably more than almost everybody else. And the question I have is, what's the end goal here? You've got all the hyperscalers sort of providing open access to AI and they're doing a sort of a land grab, trying to get as many users as possible. You've been building sort of within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Is the goal in the next couple of years maximum users? Is it data centers? Is it, you know, is it cloud? How do you think of what you're optimizing for?

**Mustafa Suleyman** (2:41)
I mean, it's a good question. So we are on any given day a $4 trillion company with almost $300 billion of revenue.

**Peter Diamandis** (2:48)
It's incredible.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (2:49)
It's just surreal and very, very, very humbling. And we play at every layer of the stack. I mean, obviously we have an enormous business in data centers and in some ways we're like a modern construction company. Hundreds of thousands of construction workers building gigawatts a year of CPU and AI accelerators of all kinds and enabling that to be available to the market. APIs on top of that, but also first-party products in every domain you can think of from gaming and LinkedIn right the way through to all the fundamentals of M365 and Windows.
And of course in our search and consumer businesses too. And fundamentally the transition that we're making is from a world of operating systems, search engines, apps and browsers to a world of agents and companions. All of these user interfaces are going to get subsumed into a conversational, agentic form and these models are going to feel like having a real assistant in your pocket 24-7 that can do anything, that has all your context. And you're going to do less and less of the direct computing, just as we're seeing now. Many software engineers are using assistive coding agents to both debug their code and also generate large amounts of code, just as we used libraries, third-party libraries. Now we're just going to use AIs to do that generation and it's making them more efficient and more accurate and faster and so on and so forth. So the trajectory we're on is quite predictable. It's one from user interfaces to AI agents and that is a paradigm shift which the company is completely focused on. Like, you know, after seeing five decades worth of transitions, I think the company is like super alert to making sure that we're best placed to manage this one.

**Peter Diamandis** (4:47)
Do you see yourself providing sort of an open-source AI like the other players out there or do you think you can keep it contained within Microsoft 365?

**Mustafa Suleyman** (4:57)
I think we're pretty open-minded. I mean, we've got some pretty small open-source models. I think realistically...