Will Everyone Have a Personal AI? With Mustafa Suleyman, Founder of DeepMind and Inflection

**Elad** (0:05)
Today on NoPriors, we're speaking with Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, the pioneering AI lab acquired by Google in 2014 for $650 million. And now co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, along with Reid Hoffman and Corinne Simonian.
Inflection AI just launched their first public product, Pi, last week. Mustafa, welcome to NoPriors. Thanks so much for joining us.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (0:26)
Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

**Sarah** (0:29)
Yeah, we're very excited to have you today. I think one thing that would be great to maybe start with is just a little bit of your personal story because I think you have a really unique background. You're very well known, obviously, for DeepMind and your pioneering work in the AI world. But I think before all that, you worked on a Muslim youth helpline. You started a partnership and consultancy that was focused on conflict resolution to navigate social problems. I'd just love to hear a little bit more about the early days of things that you did before DeepMind. And then maybe we can talk a little about DeepMind and sort of more recent stuff as well.

**Mustafa Suleyman** (0:57)
Yeah, sure. I mean, the truth is I was very much a kind of change the world kid growing up, like a big believer in grand visions, doing good, having a huge impact in the world. And that was always kind of what drove me.
So when I grew up in London and went to Oxford, but at the end of the second year of my philosophy degree, I was kind of getting a bit frustrated with this sort of theoretical nature of it all. It was full of hypothetical moral quandaries. And so a friend that I met at Oxford was starting a telephone counseling service, a kind of helpline. And it really appealed to me. It was a non-judgmental, non-directional, secular support service for young British Muslims. And this was like about six months after the 9-11 attacks. And so there was quite a lot of like rising Islamophobia. And the government was talking a lot about anti-terrorism. And, you know, in general, I think that like, sort of migrant communities were feeling the pressure. And this was a support service that was staffed entirely by us, by young people. I was 19 at the time. And yeah, I spent almost three years working pretty much full-time on that. And it was an incredible experience because it was basically my first startup. And, you know, fundraising was the name of the game, except the numbers were much, much smaller than they are these days.
And, you know, the service was staffed by almost 100 volunteer young people, which was just amazing because we felt like we can actually do something, you know. It was quite liberating and energizing to actually give this a shot. And, you know, I was very much inspired by the kind of human rights principles that was deliberately not religious, even though it used some of the kind of culturally sensitive language that helped people feel heard and understood.
So, yeah, it's had a very formative impact on my outlook.

**Sarah** (3:02)
Yeah, I know. It's super interesting, and I think we can talk more about that in the context of AI in a little bit. One other thing that you did is you also started a consultancy where you worked as a negotiator and facilitator, and I believe you worked with clients like the United Nations, the Dutch government, and others. Can you tell us a little bit more about that work as well?

**Mustafa Suleyman** (3:19)
Yeah, I mean, I was always trying to figure out how to scale my impact. And, you know, I quite quickly realized that delivering a sort of one-to-one service via a nonprofit was not going to scale a great deal, even though it had an amazing impact, you know, on a kind of human-to-human level. And so I was super interested in these like meta structures, like how does, you know, the UN actually influence behavior at the country level?
And, you know, how could we run more efficient decision-making processes where there's tension and disagreement? So we worked all over the world, actually, in Israel, Palestine, and in, you know, in Cyprus between the Greeks and the Turks. My colleagues worked in South Africa, Colombia, Guatemala.
And I think it really taught me that learning to speak other people's social languages is actually an acquired skill. And you really can do it with a little bit of attention to detail and some patience and care. It's kind of a superpower being able to deeply hear other people and make them feel heard such that they're better able to empathize with people that they disagree with. And that's been an important theme throughout my kind of career. Something I've always been interested in. So I think I co-founded that and worked on it for, I think, three years and soon realized the limitations of like large scale human processes. I mean, in 2009, I facilitated one part of the climate negotiations in Copenhagen. And yeah, it was a kind of a remarkable experience. Like, you know, 192 countries, literally a thousand NGOs and activists, many different academics, everyone proposing a different solution, a different definition of the problem. And, you know, in one way, it was sort of inspiring to see so many different cultures and ideas coming together to try to form consensus around an issue that was clearly of existential importance.