What one founder's past says about AI's future

To understand AI, you need to hear Mustafa Suleyman's story. From youth hotline founder to DeepMind creator and Microsoft AI chief, his journey explains AI's evolution and his plans for its future. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted http://plus.npr.org/ted. Correction: This story incorrectly states that DeepMind was one of the first AI companies. DeepMind was not one of the first AI companies, it was one of the first AGI—artificial general intelligence—companies. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:57Speaker 01

  It was about a year after 9/11.

• 1:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Mustafa Suleyman. In 2002, Mustafa was a student at Oxford University when a friend decided to start a helpline for young British Muslims.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  A good friend of mine at the time had just started the first prototype one evening session, I think it was a Thursday evening, of offering counselling services on the phone.

• 1:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mustafa was intrigued. He ended up joining the project to help grow it.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  And we became essentially co-founders.

• 1:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Quickly, their service was in hot demand.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  You know, it was a pretty remarkable time because, you know, young British Muslims were feeling judged by 9/11, as though they were responsible or somehow complicit. There was a lot of Islamophobia.

• 1:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  But what they found these young people needed was really just someone to talk to.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Most of the challenges that they were working through were, you know, the sort of conventional things that, you know, a young person might deal with, like relationships, bullying, self-harm, increasing homophobia in the community. And fundamentally, I think people were just looking to find support in a language that made sense to them, you know, like a London accent, using sort of Islamic terminology and having a broader understanding of the, you know, whether it was a Bangladeshi or Pakistani culture or an Arab culture, combined with the religious foundation. And just being able to reflect back that empathy went a long way.

• 2:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Twenty years later, the Muslim Youth Helpline is still going strong. And Mustafa Suleyman now lives in Silicon Valley, where he's been working on another kind of helper.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  I'm the CEO of Microsoft AI. And I work on building new AI systems and products. These days, I'm working on an AI companion.

• 3:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  With artificial intelligence and the backing of one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Mustafa Suleyman wants us each to have our own digital assistant.

• 3:12Speaker 07

  I can get philosophical, creative, or poetic if you like.

• 3:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  Available 24/7, kind of like a personal helpline.

• 3:20Speaker 06

  I can be your sounding board as you work through challenges.

• 3:23Speaker 07

  I can write stories, brainstorm ideas. Think of me as your superpower in your pocket.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  How can it serve you?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  You know, how can it support you? How can it save you time? How can it reduce your anxiety? How can it help make you feel smarter and more confident and more prepared to go about your day with no judgment, no pressure?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Hey, Manoush.

• 3:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Nice to hear from you. What's on your mind today? Microsoft calls this assistant Copilot, and it was released at the end of 2023. I've been playing around with it. Well, I need to interview Mustafa Suleyman, your creator. What do you think I should ask him? I go for topics like his vision for AI's role in society, the balance between innovation and ethics, and what he sees as the most exciting future possibilities for AI. OK, these are good. Now, can you please write the intro for this episode? Sure thing. Here's a possible intro.

• 4:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  Hey, it's Manoush Samarodi, and today's TED Radio Hour is dedicated to a deep dive with none other than Mustafa Suleyman. Co-founder of DeepMind and author of The Coming Wave, Mustafa has been a pivotal force in AI, driving both groundbreaking advancements and sparking intense debates. In this episode, we'll discuss the promises and perils of artificial intelligence and whether we're truly prepared for the wave of change it's bringing. Is AI evolving too fast for society to adapt? Are we doing enough to mitigate the risks? It's an hour of insight, reflection, and some tough questions. So, let's jump in.

• 5:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  OK, that was pretty good.

• 5:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  As Copilot noted, Mustafa Suleyman is a longtime pioneer in the field of AI. After he dropped out of Oxford University, he worked for London's mayor. He was even part of an NGO's delegation to the Copenhagen Climate Negotiations in 2009. He wasn't impressed.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  There were so many sort of difficult egos and entrenched sort of interests. And I just felt a sense of frustration, and I felt kind of demoralized after that experience.

• 5:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mustafa wanted to change the world. Governments and nonprofits didn't seem terribly effective. But there was one company that was managing to change the behavior of millions of people.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Facebook was exploding at that time. It had got to 100 million monthly active users in the course of a couple of years. And it was pretty clear to me that that was gonna have a profound impact, more so than anything I could do in, you know, sort of the world of social activism.

• 6:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Around then, Mustafa started hanging out with the older brother of a friend, a software genius named Demis Hassabis, who had been designing computer games since he was a teen. Demis saw how to make Mustafa's vision possible.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  And he was coming at the world from a completely different perspective, which I found really interesting. His belief was that we would just simulate, you know, complexity in the world. This new suite of methods in AI self-learning systems were coming up strong and looking likely to work. And, you know, we really just clicked on that kind of technical and socio-cultural view of sort of how to positively impact the world.

• 7:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  Together, the two decided to start one of the first AI companies ever. They called it DeepMind.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  It was very clear from that, even those early stages, that if we got the technology right, and it was gonna be this decade that, you know, led to major, major breakthroughs, then the consequences for humanity were gonna be significant.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  I've been lucky enough to be working on AI for almost 15 years now.

• 7:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mustafa Suleyman picks up the story from the TED stage.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Back when I started, to describe it as fringe would be an understatement. Researchers would say, no, no, we're only working on machine learning, because working on AI was seen as way too out there. In 2010, just the very mention of the phrase AGI, artificial general intelligence, would get you some seriously strange looks, and even a cold shoulder. You're actually building AGI.

• 8:08Speaker 07

  People would say, isn't that something out of science fiction? People thought it was fifty years away or a hundred years away, if it was even possible at all. Talk of AI was, I guess, kind of embarrassing. People generally thought we were weird. And I guess in some ways we kind of were.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  The ironic thing is that many people still don't think it's possible. Many people still think that we're crazy. And at the time, people really thought we were crazy. I mean, it was so far out there. It was really strange. And we were a strange group of people. I mean, you know, Demis, our third co-founder, Shane, who, you know, basically a mathematician, spent his entire career thinking about how to formalize a definition of intelligence that we could use to measure our progress in the company.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  We were misfits and kind of outsiders, and there weren't very many people willing to back us.

• 9:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  So naming the company DeepMind, what was it that you pictured in your mind that you hoped to achieve?

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we wrote our business plan in the summer of 2010 and took it to Silicon Valley to shop it around a bunch of people. And the strapline for the business plan was, you know, building artificial general intelligence safely and ethically.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  And then that evolved into a two-line mission, which was solve intelligence and use it to make the world a better place. And that dual frame was kind of the foundation of the company. That, you know, our belief that science and technology was the engine of progress. And there are some downsides, but I certainly think this is the this is the engine of creating civilization in a more healthy and sustainable way for the very long term. And, you know, if you think about it, everything that is of value in our world today is a product of us humans being able to take materials from our environment

• 10:18Speaker 01

  and recompose those into products and services and other compounds that are useful to us, from our lights to our carpets to everything that you see in front of you today.

• 10:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  In 2014, DeepMind ended up being acquired by Google. That must have been huge for you in terms of money, resources. You were off to the races.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a huge event. I mean, it was the largest acquisition Google's ever made outside of the US. We became Google's primary AGI bet. And we were empowered with tremendous resources, both people and computation, to go and both do the hard science, but also work on really important, applied, practical product problems. And that's where I kind of really honed my craft, if you like. You know, as a product maker, it was just the most amazing experience. And as early as 2015, I actually ran a hackathon project in my applied group at DeepMind.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  And the theme of our hackathon was to find high-impact ways of using our technologies for good. And so there were lots of application, there were sort of lots of prototype hackathon experiments in healthcare or in energy systems, both of which went on to become significant parts of DeepMind applied. And, you know, my group published three papers in Nature showing human-level performance on, for example, classifying eye diseases, the top 50 eye diseases from OCT scans, three-dimensional eye scans, showing that we could perform as well as a panel

• 12:14Speaker 01

  of radiologists in identifying cancerous tissues in mammograms, showing that we could predict the onset of sepsis and acute kidney injury, as well as the top, you know, renal doctors using vast amounts of data. And this was way back in sort of 2016, 2017, 2018. And it really helped to kind of lay a foundation for the application of large-scale machine learning to, you know, tough social problems. And that was very much my motivation.

• 12:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, more of the incredible breakthroughs that Mustafa and DeepMind had at Google that changed the way medicine works today, and why Mustafa ended up leaving the company.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  The company was just frankly being too slow to get things into production.

• 13:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  Today on the show, the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, and the future of artificial intelligence. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

• 13:30Speaker 07

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• 14:50Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 16:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, we're spending the hour with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, who was the co-founder of one of the first AI tech companies ever, DeepMind. The company was acquired by Google in 2014. And Mustafa and his co-founder, Demis Hassabis, went on to have numerous scientific breakthroughs, including a project called AlphaFold. AlphaFold uses AI to figure out incredibly complex protein structures in molecules, the building blocks of every biological process in our bodies.

• 17:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  It won Hassabis the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Here he is on the TED stage. The rule of thumb is that it takes one

• 17:38Speaker 07

  PhD student, their whole PhD, so four, five years to uncover one structure. But there are 200 million proteins known to nature. So you could just, you know, it would just take forever to do that. And so we managed to actually fold using AlphaFold. In one year, all those 200 million proteins known to science. So that's a billion years of PhD time saved.

• 18:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  AlphaFold was just one of the ways that computers were solving biological problems, says Mustafa Suleyman. I mean, this really, AlphaFold is really the first time we started hearing about, I guess, the term computational biology. This idea of using tech and science to rethink how biology works. And then getting it out into the world, changing the way we treat diseases, or maybe developing crops that are more resilient. All kinds of ways that what you figured out at DeepMind would potentially change the world, which was the goal.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That was the core mission of the company from day one. Like, how could we take that process of synthesis and prediction and turn that into a general-purpose system that could use all the data and all the compute that we have in the world to try and solve these very hard problems? Whether it's growing crops in drought-resistant environments, whether it's more efficient ways to do water desalination, whether it's long-term battery storage.

• 19:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  But in 2022, Mustafa decided to leave DeepMind and Google. There were reports that he clashed with Google leadership over using technology for military projects and that some employees had complaints about his management style. Mustafa says he was simply frustrated with the pace of innovation and was anxious to get an AI product out into the world that everyone could use.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  You know, I really wanted to scale these large language models and get them into production as quickly as possible. And the company was just frankly being too slow to get things into production. And I felt that it was an opportunity to sort of have all the resources that, you know, that I needed. Like, so I went out and fundraised over a billion dollars. And, you know, just work extremely fast with a very small team. And I think I, at the time, I was, and I am still now, very much a believer that these AI companions

• 20:19Speaker 01

  are going to become an everyday part of our lives.

• 20:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mustafa's AI, called Pi, debuted in 2023. Chatbots have taken the world by storm. Several months later, rival company OpenAI put out its AI product, ChatGPT, for free.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  ChatGPT answers questions and writes essays. They read like the work of a human.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  An artificial intelligence tool has the potential to change the way we live.

• 20:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  This was the point when AI went mainstream. And Mustafa's small nimble startup just didn't have the resources of these bigger tech companies.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  The truth is, the pace of big tech had really accelerated in 2023. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, everyone was really going for it. And essentially made these huge models available to everybody for free, which sort of changed our business model.

• 21:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  At that very tough moment, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella approached Mustafa and made him an offer.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  You know, the offer that he made was, well, look, we've got all the computation, all the data and all the distribution that you could dream of. Come and run consumer products here at Microsoft and really build the future of AI here. And that was a huge offer.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  So the product that we're building at Microsoft is called Copilot. And the reason why we've called it that is because Copilot is an aide. You know, it's a consigliere. It's an assistant. It's in your corner, aligned to your interests, on your team, backing you up.

• 21:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, I actually talked to Copilot about my interview with you. How do you feel about Mustafa Suleyman, considering that he is your creator? I'd say I'm

• 22:08Speaker 06

  Intrigued by Mustafa.

• 22:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  Just so you know, she said she's intrigued by you, just as she is with many innovators in the tech world.

• 22:15Speaker 06

  And his work has pushed the boundaries of what's possible.

• 22:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  I will say it was very helpful in terms of suggesting topics to bring up with you. But it could not check the weather. And is that simply because of how the access or the data, the information that the agent or copilot has access to, that it's not immediate yet?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are loads of weaknesses of our copilot today. But all of those things will come. I mean, we're working on all of those things. It will have permanent memory, session to session, infinitely across time. It'll be able to access, you know, your files and folders if you choose to make those available, your email, your calendar, and be able to browse the web for you in the future. And all of that will be integrated into these like seamless conversational, very friendly, polite experiences. I literally was talking to it last night about what to watch. And we were going back and forth on whether I would enjoy Pan's Labyrinth and whether I've got the time to watch all of Dune, because I haven't seen Dune 1 or Dune 2.

• 23:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, it reminds me a little of the hotline for Muslim youth that you're describing. It's helpful, it's infinitely patient, it's supportive. Are we talking mostly about companionship and mental health resources that this can provide? Or how do you see it?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  No, I think that the cool thing about Copilot is that it doesn't judge you for asking a stupid question. Even if you have to ask that question three times over in five different ways. You know, even your best friend might be like, hey, come on, man. I mean, you're asking me this again, seriously? Whereas, you know, Copilot's here for it. There's obviously some similarities to stuff I've done in the past. And I guess it's kind of inspired by nonviolent communication, if I'm honest with you. It's certainly not like a mental health app or, you know, anything like that. It's just got a little bit of kindness and empathy. It's got some emotional intelligence. And I think that's no bad thing.

• 24:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Gosh, is that where we've gotten to? That technology has to tell us how to communicate with each other better, nonviolently?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Well, it doesn't tell us, it just.

• 24:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  Demonstrates.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It demonstrates. But that's what technology's always done. The choice architecture, the buttons, the colors, the language. That is shaping our behavior. Whether it's an infinite scrolling feed or whether it's a encouragement to go and film your lunch, you know, for Instagram or create a little video for TikTok. I mean, all of those inputs shape behavior. And so we have to be super thoughtful about what those inputs actually are. Because technology shapes us in return and we're in this constant cyclical sort of feedback loop and interaction. And that is kind of what's propelling us forward as a civilization and it's very powerful.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  And so far, so good. It's actually been, you know, very, very productive over the last couple of centuries. Science has massively delivered for us. But we shouldn't just assume that that's going to happen naturally or inevitably. We have to really be deliberate and thoughtful about what the consequences are ahead of time.

• 25:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  In the book that you wrote that came out in 2023, you really tried to put what's happening with AI in a historical context. So if the printing press let people own and share information and the personal computer let people search and disseminate information, tell me how you're thinking, you can explain to people what AI will do for people now.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Each new wave of technology is fundamentally a new interface. It's a new interlocutor, translator, a way of sort of accessing and creating new information, new tools, new knowledge. So if the last wave of social media and web search help people to access information.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  This wave is going to help us to invent and create new ideas, be it in science or in culture and media and entertainment. And I think everybody is ultimately going to have an AI companion, just as we have a search engine or a smartphone, and just as we use a browser. You'll just ask your computer in natural language, you know, can you write that contract and check that it's okay? Can you create that new piece of software for me? And you're just going to describe what it is. Can you help me plan that trip, you know, for my parents that are coming into town? So, you know, that kind of breakthrough is a change in the interface,

• 27:15Speaker 01

  which changes itself what we can actually get done. And I think it's going to be pretty transformational.

• 27:22Speaker 07

  With the invention of computers, we quickly jumped from the first mainframes and transistors to today's smartphones and virtual reality headsets. Information, knowledge, communication, computation. In this revolution, creation has exploded like never before. And now a new wave is upon us: artificial intelligence. These waves of history are clearly speeding up as each one is amplified and accelerated by the last. And if you look back, it's clear that we are in the fastest and most consequential wave ever. The journeys of humanity and technology are now deeply intertwined. In just eighteen months,

• 28:06Speaker 07

  over a billion people have used large language models. We've witnessed one landmark event after another. Just a few years ago, people said that AI would never be creative. And yet, AI now feels like an endless river of creativity, making poetry and images and music and video that stretch the imagination. People said it would never be empathetic. And yet today, millions of people enjoy meaningful conversations with AIs, talking about their hopes and dreams and helping them work through difficult emotional challenges. AIs can now drive cars, manage energy grids, and even invent new molecules. Just a few years ago, each of these was impossible.

• 28:52Speaker 07

  And all of this is turbocharged by spiraling exponentials of data and computation. Last year, Inflection 2.5, our last model, used five billion times more computation than the DeepMind AI that beat the old-school Atari games just over 10 years ago. That's nine orders of magnitude more computation. 10x per year, every year, for almost a decade. Over the same time, the size of these models has grown from first tens of millions of parameters to then billions of parameters, and very soon, tens of trillions of parameters.

• 29:33Speaker 07

  If someone did nothing but read 24 hours a day for their entire life, they'd consume eight billion words. And of course, that's a lot of words. But today, the most advanced AIs consume more than eight trillion words in a single month of training. And all of this is set to continue. The long arc of technological history is now in an extraordinary new phase.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  I think the way to think about this is that we're at the very earliest stages of the development of this technology. Today, when you need to go and sort of ask a question like that, you go to a search engine like Google. You type in a query, you get these ten blue links, you have to then go to the webpage. You have to read all of this sort of complicated stuff formatted in 25 different ways. And that takes time. And it means that you don't always want to invest two or three minutes to go and make sense of that. You don't always have the energy for it. Whereas you can always just like quickly send off a text or quickly make a phone call or leave a voice note. So I think it's lowering the barrier to entry to access high-quality information.

• 30:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  But how do we know it's high-quality information? How do we make sure of that?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Well, there was an amazing study. Uh, two months ago, that was published in the journal Science, which showed that for over a thousand uh participants who held strong conspiracy theory beliefs. Mm hmm. So this is things like flat earthers or all kinds of things about the Covid vaccine, et cetera, et cetera. And after a month of conversation with an AI that had been primed to um talk about these conspiracy theories, it reduced the belief in those conspiracy theories by twenty percent, uh which is pretty significant. And I think shows the first glimmers of what it's like to have,

• 31:26Speaker 01

  and you know, that kind of patient, insistent, deliberate access to high quality information. Hmm. And in the case of this study, human fact checkers, expert human fact checkers, um went back and read over the transcripts. Mm hmm. So my point is, the the value of these systems is that they actually are more accurate. And that's only going to continue. They're more accurate than your average human are answering any question today. Right, you know, we've we've sort of passed the Turing test because they're more, you know, fluent and conversational than we ever thought they were going to be, which is pretty remarkable. And that's only going to continue.

• 32:07Speaker 07

  So what does this mean in practice? Well, just as the internet gave us the browser and the smartphone gave us apps, the cloud-based supercomputer is ushering in a new era of ubiquitous AIs. Everything will soon be represented by a conversational interface, or to put it another way, a personal AI. And these AIs will be infinitely knowledgeable. And soon, they'll be factually accurate and reliable. They'll have near perfect IQ. They'll also have exceptional EQ. They'll be kind, supportive, empathetic.

• 32:48Speaker 07

  These elements on their own would be transformational. Just imagine if everybody had a personalized tutor in their pocket and access to low-cost medical advice. A lawyer and a doctor, a business strategist and coach, all in your pocket 24 hours a day. But things really start to change when they develop what I call AQ, their actions quotient. This is their ability to actually get stuff done in the digital and physical world. And before long, it won't just be people that have AIs. Strange as it may sound, every organization, from small business to nonprofit to national government, each will have their own.

• 33:28Speaker 07

  Every town, building, and object will be represented by a unique, interactive persona. And these won't just be mechanistic assistants. There'll be companions, confidants, colleagues, friends and partners as varied and unique as we all are. At this point, AIs will convincingly imitate humans at most tasks. And we'll feel this at the most intimate of scales. An AI organizing a community get-together for an elderly neighbor, a sympathetic expert helping you make sense of a difficult diagnosis. But we'll also feel it at the largest scales.

• 34:07Speaker 07

  Accelerating scientific discovery, autonomous cars on the roads, drones in the skies. They'll both order the takeout and run the power station. They'll interact with us, and of course, with each other. They'll speak every language, take in every pattern of sensor data, sights, sounds, streams and streams of information, far surpassing what any one of us could consume in a thousand lifetime.

• 34:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  When we come back, the remarkable, but also terrifying visions of what AI may be capable of in the future. Dystopian scenarios that might make you want to unplug all your devices forever. Are they realistic or just fear mongering? The CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, weighs in. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be back in a minute.

• 35:19Speaker 05

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• 36:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, the future of artificial intelligence. We're spending the hour with the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman. In 2023, Mustafa wrote a book called The Coming Wave.

• 36:55Speaker 06

  In The Coming Wave, Suleyman delves into scenarios where-

• 37:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  I asked Microsoft's co-pilot to help me talk through the reasons why Mustafa says AI could be so dangerous.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  Imagine a world where artificial intelligence has seamlessly integrated into everyday life.

• 37:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  The first is what he calls asymmetry.

• 37:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  Meaning vast amounts of data that could get into the hands of a single person who could go rogue.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Because we're now concentrating knowledge and capability into smaller and smaller units that are transmissible. You can download open source models, you know, for a few gigabytes and put it on a thumb drive and, you know, so that's the kind of asymmetric impact because that therefore means that individual actors or smaller groups of actors can have a massive one-to-many broadcast effect.

• 37:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is AI unleashing computing power to many, um, kind of like the anonymous hacker who could bring down an entire electrical grid, that kind of thing.

• 38:04Speaker 07

  Healthcare systems could be overwhelmed, economies paralyzed.

• 38:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  Is that right?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  That's right. You can just sort of self-start immediately.

• 38:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, so number two is hyper-evolution.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, software itself just evolving in hyper-real time.

• 38:21Speaker 07

  In this scenario, a rogue scientist or a bioterrorist could design a pathogen with specific traits like heightened transmissibility or increased lethality.

• 38:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  Or new iterations of weapons and surveillance could be developed.

• 38:37Speaker 07

  To track people's movements, conversations, and even emotions through their online activities.

• 38:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  And put to use before authorities have time to test them or put any safeguards in place.

• 38:48Speaker 07

  A small programming error or a hacked system could result in catastrophic loss of life.

• 38:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  How could a country build a defense system if it doesn't even know what it needs to defend itself against? Which brings us to the third dangerous attribute of AI: omni-use. One single kind of technology will be able to do everything.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Your AI companion will make phone calls.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Call other AIs or call other humans to check on, you know, stock or, you know, sort of availability in a hotel or get some advice from a local tour guide on where you're going to visit. Um, or it will send emails, um, or it will, you know, talk to another database or a backend. All of those things are essentially the AI learning to act on your behalf.

• 39:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  Sure, but what if your AI also talks to another database or makes a trade on your behalf and decides to shut down the entire stock market? Which relates to the fourth and final, maybe scariest attribute, autonomy, AI that takes action on its own without a human's go ahead.

• 40:00Speaker 06

  Autonomous weapon systems operate on battlefields, making split-second decisions about targeting and firing without direct human oversight.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  I mean, autonomy is one of the core characteristics of these systems. Uh, it's a long road and it's going to be many years before, um, these systems are truly autonomous and we want to be very careful about that because we have to ask ourselves, like, what is the added benefit of the system operating autonomously and is that worthwhile? Is it safe? Is it stable? Is it controllable? Um, can we really trust that autonomy? Um, so yeah, I think it's one that we'll have to be very careful of.

• 40:39Speaker 06

  The societal disruption could lead to widespread fear, mistrust and geopolitical tension. Suleyman and other experts argue for robust oversight and ethical guidelines to ensure that these powerful technologies are used responsibly and safely.

• 40:58Speaker 07

  For years, we in the AI community have had a tendency to refer to this as just tools. But that doesn't really capture what's actually happening here.

• 41:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Mustafa Suleyman on the TED stage.

• 41:09Speaker 07

  AIs are clearly more dynamic, more ambiguous, more integrated and more emergent than mere tools, which are entirely subject to human control. So to contain this wave, to put human agency at its centre, and to mitigate the inevitable unintended consequences that are likely to arise, we should start to think about them as we might a new kind of digital species. Now, it's just an analogy. It's not a literal description, and it's not perfect. I mean, for a start, they clearly aren't biological in any traditional sense. But just pause for a moment, and really think about what they already do. They communicate in our languages.

• 41:53Speaker 07

  They see what we see. They consume unimaginably large amounts of information.

• 42:00Speaker 07

  They have memory. They have personality. They have creativity. They can even reason to some extent and formulate rudimentary plans. They can act autonomously if we allow them. And they do all this at levels of sophistication that is far beyond anything that we've ever known from a mere tool. And so saying AI is mainly about the math or the code is like saying we humans are mainly about carbon and water.

• 42:33Speaker 07

  It's true, but it completely misses the point.

• 42:38Speaker 07

  And yes, I get it, this is a super arresting thought. But I honestly think this frame helps sharpen our focus on the critical issues. What are the risks?

• 42:51Speaker 07

  What are the boundaries that we need to impose? What kind of AI do we want to build? Or allow to be built? This is a story that's still unfolding. Nothing should be accepted as a given. We all must choose what we create, what AIs we bring into the world, or not.

• 43:13Speaker 07

  These are the questions for all of us here today and all of us alive at this moment.

• 43:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  You lay out 10 strategies for containing AI. And one of the easiest, it seems, is having more researchers working on safety. Do you have more researchers working on copilot safety? I mean, one thing that worries me is people using your AI to help them do destructive things or further their destructive views. Is that something you're thinking about at Microsoft?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a big safety team. We are definitely very focused on that. We're very focused particularly on the sort of tone of the AI. Like, how do we make sure that it isn't too sycophantic? And do we make sure that it isn't over flattering? How do we make sure that it doesn't mirror you and and sort of lead to this sort of negative cycle of reinforcing unhealthy views? And that's a real art and craft in trying to sort of engineer that healthy balance where, you know, your your sort of AI companion can push back on your views in constructive

• 44:27Speaker 01

  ways without making you feel judged or making you feel angry, make you feel heard for your anger. It may be the case that you are angry about immigration, that you feel that you haven't had the opportunities and access to jobs in your community, that you feel have been available to new people coming into your world. And and so, you know, it's about being respectful and acknowledging that people do genuinely feel aggrieved by that and not shutting them down because they don't adhere to some meta view. So, you know, and I think that's a very challenging line to draw. It requires, you know, real care and attention.

• 45:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  So what role do you see yourself playing in terms of pushing the tech industry towards? The public good, I mean, is that a role that you sort of are taking on? What do your fellow technologists think when they hear you talking about some of the more pessimistic visions you have for how AI could be deployed?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Well, I think I'm both a pessimist and an optimist, and that's not a bias. It's just an observation of the landscape before us. So most of all, I'm inspired by the practice of science. We have to say what we see and do our best to refute a hypothesis that we have with respect to evidence. And so I see evidence for both trends, and that's why I wrote about them. Look, I think, in terms of how we're shaping the industry, I'm a big fan of the work that many of these NGO organizations and social activists have been doing in order to raise questions and to challenge and push back. I think that's healthy.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  We need more of that, and I'm very open minded to it. I've been very encouraging of additional regulation for a long time. I think this is a moment when going slowly and adding friction to the system will be long term beneficial. And I think it's rational to just be a little cautious and increase the burden of proof, you know, and just make it a requirement that, for example, an AI shouldn't just be a straightforward imitation of a human. We want to create an aid, a conciliaria tool, that is an amplifier and a supporter.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  And so there's kind of a lot of things to think through in terms of how this manifests in the world.

• 47:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Do you think there should be mandatory testing requirements that before any technology's released to the public, there's a They should have to go through a certain series of tests and if they don't pass, they don't make it to market?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  I think we're approaching that time, yep. I think sometime before 2030, we will need something like that. I don't know if now is quite the right time, you know. If you look back on the impact that these sort of chatbots have had in the last two or three years, it's been unbelievably positive, overwhelmingly positive. So had we had those checks ahead of time three years ago, I think it could have slowed things down quite a lot. But that doesn't mean that it's not right to keep asking that same question every year and reconsider is now the right time for pre-deployment testing? I think that's the right question.

• 48:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  There is a sense that big tech needs to regain trust from consumers. There's a lot of people who just given up, you know, thrown up their hands and said, well, the convenience has outweighed all the digital privacy problems that we have. I give up. This is just the world we live in. But there are other people who are saying, I don't feel great about giving a tech company all my data, which is what you need to run some of these new AI tools, especially if you're telling me that terrible things could happen to it. You're clearly very cautious when it comes to the incredible powers of technology.

• 48:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  But how are you balancing that with the demands on you to innovate and sell these products?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Well, I personally think that there is going to be a huge amount of value to the user to have your co-pilot companion be able to read over your email, look at your calendar, schedule things, buy things for you, book and plan. And, you know, I think the truth is, we have to wait and see if consumers agree with that. They may not, and that's a very fair and reasonable thing to do. But I believe that the utility will drive the way. And in conjunction with that. You know, we have to make sure that we have the strongest privacy and security infrastructure to protect that information, um, uh, just as we already do today, right?

• 49:34Speaker 01

  I mean, many, many billions of people store their, their email with, with Microsoft and rely on Microsoft's security to protect their consumer work and their enterprise work. And so that's a massive, massive priority for the company. But, you know, it isn't just about the utility. Obviously it has to be really useful. Obviously it has to have good privacy and security controls. But I think it's also about the way that we approach it, like how do we take feedback? And do we admit when we make mistakes? Um, you know, how open minded are we to different ways of doing things? You know, what's our business model? Um, so I think my commitment is to sort of try to be as open minded as I can on all

• 50:17Speaker 01

  those questions and just listen and just innovate carefully, observe the consequences and iterate as we go. That's the best I can see, uh, to do at the moment.

• 50:27Speaker 07

  In the past, unlocking economic growth often came with huge downsides. The economy expanded as people discovered new continents and opened up new frontiers. But they colonized populations at the same time. We built factories, but they were grim and dangerous places to work. We struck oil, but we polluted the planet. Now, because we are still designing and building AI, we have the potential and opportunity to do it better, radically better. And today, we're not discovering a new continent and plundering its resources. We're building one from scratch.

• 51:11Speaker 07

  Sometimes people say that data or chips are the 21st century's new oil. But that's totally the wrong image. AI is to the mind what nuclear fusion is to energy. Limitless, abundant, world changing.

• 51:30Speaker 07

  And AI really is different. That means we have to think about it creatively and honestly. We have to push our analogies and our metaphors to the very limits to be able to grapple with what's coming. Because this is not just another invention. AI is itself an infinite inventor. And yes, this is exciting and promising and concerning and intriguing all at once. To be quite honest, it's pretty surreal. But step back, see it on the long view of glacial time. And these really are the very most appropriate metaphors that we have today. Since the beginning of life on Earth,

• 52:13Speaker 07

  we've been evolving, changing, and then creating everything around us in our human world today. And AI isn't something outside of this story. In fact, it's the very opposite. It's the whole of everything that we have created distilled down into something that we can all interact with and benefit from. It's a reflection of humanity across time. And in this sense, it isn't a new species at all. This is where the metaphors end. AI isn't separate. AI isn't even in some senses new. AI is us. It's all of us.

• 52:56Speaker 07

  And this is perhaps the most promising and vital thing of all. As we build out AI, we can and must reflect all that is good, all that we love, all that is special about humanity, our empathy, our kindness, our curiosity and our creativity. This, I would argue, is the greatest challenge of the 21st century. But also the most wonderful, inspiring and hopeful opportunity for all of us. Thank you.

• 53:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Mustafa Suleyman. He's the CEO of Microsoft AI and the author of the book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma. You can see his full talk at ted.com.

• 53:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  Thank you so much for listening to our episode on the future of AI. It was produced by Katie Monteleone. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White, Harsha Nahada, James Delahoussaye, Fiona Guerin, and Matthew Cloutier. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Tiffany Vera Castro, Becky Brown, and Gilli Moon. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Highlash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Anusha Zamorodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 54:25Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.