Mustafa Suleyman: Will AI Save Humanity or End It?

**Trevor Noah** (0:00)
So I feel like people fall in one of two camps on AI. They either think it's going to destroy all of humanity. 42% of CEOs surveyed fear artificial intelligence could destroy humanity. This is something that, put in the wrong hands, could destroy humanity. Or they think it's going to solve every single problem. Mustafa Suleyman.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
Mustafa Suleyman.

**Trevor Noah** (0:20)
Mustafa Suleyman is an artificial intelligence pioneer. He is the AI CEO at Microsoft. He is very big in the artificial intelligence world.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
How do we manage these technologies so that we can co-exist with them safely?

**Mustafa Suleyman** (0:35)
Can humans and AI co-exist with each other peacefully without one taking over the other?

**Trevor Noah** (0:44)
This is What Now with Trevor Noah. Mustafa, how are you, man?

**Mustafa Suleyman** (1:02)
I'm very good, man.

**Trevor Noah** (1:03)
This is great, this is good. It's funny, there's almost two or three different types of conversations I have with people. There's ones where I'm hanging out, it's my friends, we're discussing just whatever, shooting the shit. Then there's some where I bring a person in and I'm trying to get something from them or learn about their world. And then there's the third type of interview that often stresses me the most, because I feel like I'm speaking to a person who has like an outsize influence on our world. And if I mess it up, I don't ask the questions that the world needs. And I feel like you're one of those people, because even before your current job, you were considered one of, like if there was a Mount Rushmore of the founders of AI, with none of the baggage, with none of the baggage of Mount Rushmore.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (1:51)
No colonial history. No colonial history.

**Trevor Noah** (1:53)
Yeah, no colonial history. But if there was like a large Mount Rushmore, your face would be up there, you know, as being part of DeepMind and the founders of DeepMind. And then now you are helping Microsoft, like one of the biggest, you know, tech companies in the world by, you know, market cap and just by influence shape its view on AI. And so maybe that's why I wanted to start this conversation, because it's, it almost feels like where we meet you in the journey now. You know, what would you say has been the biggest shift in your life and what you've been doing in AI? Going from a startup that was on the cusp and this fledgling world of AI, to now being at the head of what's going to shape all of our lives in AI.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (2:43)
Wow, what an opener. I mean, seriously, no pressure.
You know, the crazy thing is that I've just got incredibly lucky. I mean, I was strange enough to start working on something that everybody thought was impossible, was totally sci-fi, that was just dismissed by even the best academics, let alone any of the big tech companies didn't take it seriously. I mean, 2010, just to really ground on that, we had just got mobile phones three years earlier. The App Store was just coming alive. You couldn't even easily upload a photo from your phone to an app or the cloud, right? And somehow, my courageous visionary co-founders, Demis, Hasibis, and Shane Legg, had the foresight to know that digital technologies ultimately become these learning algorithms, which when fed more data and given more compute, have a very good chance of learning the structure and nature of the universe. And so I was just very privileged to be friends with them, be part of that mission. And I was only 25 years old, and had the fearlessness to believe that if we could create something that truly understood us as humans, then that actually represents one of the best chances we have of improving the human condition. And that's always been my motivation to create technologies that actually serve us and make the world a better place. Like, I was cheesy before it was cheesy.

**Trevor Noah** (4:33)
Pre-cheese. You said something that like, that sparked a thought in my mind, and I think a lot of people would love to better understand this. We see headlines all the time saying, AI this, AI your job, AI does it, the thinking, the not thinking though. And you said something that engineers will gloss over quite quickly. You'll go data and compute, and then a model and then it...
Help me break that down. Just explain that to me in the simplest terms possible. What changed and what are you actually doing? Because it's like we always had data, right? We've had documents, we've had files, we've had information. We always had computers. Well, not always, but we had computers for decades. What changed and what is AI actually coming from?