Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job

Today I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. This is a real burner of an episode. We covered everything from his approach to training new models to his criticisms of Anthropic talking about Claude as though it is conscious. Of course, we also talked about Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, how Mustafa is thinking about all the negative polling and political pushback around AI right now, and whether any of the consumer products are good enough to overcome it. Like I said, it’s a burner. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: Microsoft and OpenAI broke up — now they’re ready to fight | The Verge Microsoft Build 2026: The 7 biggest announcements | The Verge Microsoft’s first advanced reasoning AI is here | The Verge Microsoft’s new ‘superintelligence’ game plan is all about business | The Verge Here’s how the new Microsoft and OpenAI deal breaks down | The Verge Microsoft AI chief says 18 months until white-collar tasks automated by AI | FT Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:33Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. And I'm actually going to keep this intro pretty short. First, if you're watching the video, you can tell that I'm working from the basement of my wife's family farm. But second, and way more importantly, it's a real burner of an episode. Mustafa and I covered everything from his approach to training new models to his deep criticisms of anthropic talking about Claude as though it's conscious. Of course, we also talked about all of the AI announcements Microsoft just made at Build, its development office, the company's relationship with OpenAI, which is very different than it used to be, and the cultural and political pushback to AI across the country. I really wanted to know how Mustafa was thinking about it and whether any of

• 2:16Speaker 04

  the consumer AI products available today are enough to overcome those objections. Like I said, this one's a bird and Mustafa was down to talk about all of it. Okay, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI. Here we go.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  Mustafa Suleyman, you are the CEO of Microsoft AI. Welcome back to Decoder.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  Neelai, great to be with you again.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm very excited to talk to you. I think our previous conversation, one of my favorite conversations about AI and how it should make us feel and what it's for that I've had in all the conversations about AI that we've had, there are some big changes at Microsoft, maybe some very important recontextualization about how people feel about AI that I want to talk to you about in particular. And then there's Microsoft Build, the big Microsoft's big developer conference, lots of new announcements, lots of big ideas about what computers are for and maybe where they should be that I want to get into. Let's start at the very start. This is some deep Decoder stuff that is important to understand before all the rest of it. Since you joined Microsoft, you have restructured how AI works there. Your role has changed.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  The last time I talked to you, you were in charge of a bunch of consumer products. That has been since set aside. You're now training new models. You're on the frontier. Explain how Microsoft AI is structured now and how it's structured inside Microsoft.

• 3:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I mean, I guess the last like 15 to 18 months or so, we've been on this journey to reestablish our relationship with with OpenAI. And it's taken a minute. I think they culminated in a new contract that we got done finally in October of last year. And there were lots and lots of different provisions in that, including cement and extending the partnership, but crucially freeing us up to be able to pursue superintelligence independently, as well as keep, you know, buying and licensing their models. So since October, I've been assembling the superintelligence team, building clusters of sufficient And scale to train frontier models, you know, hiring a team focused on superintelligence.

• 4:29Speaker 05

  And so that was quite a big shift for us because it sort of enabled me to focus just on the superintelligence mission. And that has then culminated in, you know, a few things that we announced this week at Build. We have seven new models across all the modalities and so on. So it's been a pretty big shift and I think a long time in the planning and a great relief for us to now be, you know, in the game and pursuing the absolute frontier over the next few years.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Was this the plan when you were hired at Microsoft?

• 4:57Speaker 05

  It's been the plan certainly for the last eighteen months. I mean, I think the relationship with OpenAI has gone through lots of ups and downs. And in many ways, you know, is a, I think is going to go down as one of the most successful partnerships, you know, in history. It's been great for OpenAI and it's been great for Microsoft and all good relationships evolve. And I think this is just the next stage in our evolution.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  Let me ask you about that, that evolution specifically. You know, we, we all just saw that the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI and Sam Altman. Microsoft was involved in that trial in the sense that every so often a lawyer from Microsoft would stand up and say, and we weren't around. And someone would say, yes, and that was that. But obviously, you know, what came out during that trial, what has been clear during this entire time is that the original notion was that OpenAI would be a research lab and provide models and that Microsoft would build the products. And Microsoft had expertise in going to market, it had expertise in enterprise, it was trying to regain foothold in consumer in a variety of ways.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  And that this would be a platform shift and that the, the research work would be over at OpenAI and the product work would be inside of Microsoft. That's the thing that changed, right, is OpenAI wanted to make more and more consumer products. Obviously, given your new role and your new focus, Microsoft more and more wants to make its own models. Why the split? What, what didn't work in that relationship?

• 6:23Speaker 05

  I mean, I think OpenAI is led by an incredibly ambitious founding team and Sam himself. And so naturally, as they started to get more traction and generate a ton of revenue, they saw opportunities to go full stack. So it wasn't just that they started working on consumer products. Obviously, ChatGPT was incredibly successful. They also started working on their own data centers. They started creating their own chip. There's lots of rumors flowing around about their own consumer hardware devices. They started taking models direct to market through ChatGPT Enterprise. You know, so across the stack, they were kind of broadening way beyond research over the last two, three, four

• 7:05Speaker 05

  years. And naturally, the same is also true for Microsoft. I mean, I think the partnership's now five or six years old and still has another, you know, four, five, six years to run. And likewise, you know, we're one of the largest technology companies in the world. You know, we have 493 of the 500 largest companies store and process most of their data on our systems, use Azure, use M365 and Teams. I think people often underappreciate how enormous we are and how big our distribution is in Enterprise. And so, long term, and you know, I do mean, you know, over the five, six, seven, 10 years, we have to make sure that we're completely sustainable and we're not just a recipient of somebody else's IP that

• 7:49Speaker 05

  we then slightly modify and adapt and put into production for our products, but we actually have the ability to stand on our own two feet and create world-class models. I mean, superintelligence is coming. I think it's just around the corner. And so I think it's going to be, you know, basically the most valuable technology of all time. And you know, there's sort of no way that, long term, we could be structurally dependent on a third party for providing that IP for all eternity. And so that's been the transition that, you know, obviously was triggered, you know, sort of when OpenAI and so on had their board issue. But then, as I came in and my team came in, we started building that out. We're on that transition. And I think we're in a great spot because we can take a

• 8:31Speaker 05

  Fairly steady, you know, careful, long-term optimal position, both for OpenAI, which I think has done incredibly well out of this and for us.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I want to spend some time on superintelligence is right around the corner. I just want to put a pin in it now because I just want to kind of understand the transition for one more turn here. There's a moment of trial, it's sort of a very funny message from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. He says, I don't want to be Intel and have OpenAI be Microsoft, which is very, very funny in the context of Microsoft CEO himself saying, I don't want to be the provider and make, have them be the platform that provides all the value and collects all the value and maybe we'll be swapped out, right? I don't want ChatGPT to run on Azure and then OpenAI will go get all the value and then maybe they can swap us out, just as happened with Windows and Intel over time. Is that a realization? Did Nadella come to you? What was that meeting like where he

• 9:22Speaker 04

  said, okay, OpenAI has had its board issues, we need to get back on the frontier and stand at our own two feet. What did that conversation look like and how was that decision made?

• 9:33Speaker 05

  I mean, obviously that's Satya's decision and, you know, as well as like Amy and Brad, many other people in the company. But I think it's, as with anything, you know, these are slow-moving changes in the company as it comes to realize that a direction that we're taking, you know, needs a little bit of tweaking and adjustment. And so that was happening, you know, way before, you know, the sort of November board incident. And I think it just builds up over time as you look at, you know, the kind of constellation of different fronts, you know, around which we're competing directly increasingly, all the tension that comes from that. But also just knowing that partnerships like that don't last forever.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  I mean, OpenAI wants to be a trillion-dollar public company, has incredible revenues, is growing like crazy. They want to have the freedom to operate and be able to buy, you know, compute from, you know, all sorts of other places, build their own compute, partner with whoever they want. So the initial, you know, construct was formed, you know, the contract was formed. At a time when the companies were very different in terms of size and scale and balance of needs and stuff. And so I think it made sense for that moment, but then, you know, it became pretty clear that, you know, this is something that we have to be able to own and control ourselves and do right by our own customers. Like I said, I mean, we have an incredible distribution on enterprise, which I think is just completely unrivaled

• 10:59Speaker 05

  in the world. And so we have to make sure we're building the best things for our for our customers. And that looks, you know, slightly different to a company that has been jointly optimizing both for the consumer with chat GPT and also for the enterprise and also for the fundamental science mission of superintelligence, which includes, you know, a whole bunch of different directions which are overlapping, but you know, could arguably said to be orthogonal to the consumer and the enterprise directions too. So, you know, naturally, I think that's how partnerships evolve and they get, you know, re, re, uh, reset periodically.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, but, uh, building a frontier model is very expensive, I'm told, reliably told. This is a very expensive project to set about on. At some point, Amy Hood, the CFO of Microsoft, has to say, yep, you've got the budget. When did that happen? And was that just a text message? Was there, was there a meeting? Tell me about the specifics there.

• 11:50Speaker 05

  I, I think, look, we, we've sort of made the decision, um, the early part of last year, um, which obviously informed all the contract negotiations, which then all got, you know, resolved and signed in October. Um, and, you know, it, it is a significant investment, but we have a, a long time to make it. I mean, we've already made significant investments in our own self-sufficiency mission. Our Maya 200 chip is actually an outstanding chip as one example, right? I mean, we now are able to manufacture and ship a chip that is 30% cheaper than a GB 200 inside of our own clusters. Um, and now that we can co-design our own models with it, um, the MAI Thinking One model that we've just released, um, you

• 12:34Speaker 05

  know, actually delivers 1.4x performance per watt improvement on top of the 30% improvement that you get from running on, on a Maya 200, once we co-optimize the models for our tasks. So the, the value of making sure that you own and control your own stack and direct, you know, the entire co-design effort end to end for the use cases that are most important to us, which is obviously agentic coding, our developers, our enterprises. I mean, that clearly pays the dividends that justify the investment that we have to make over the next few years.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, you said self sufficiency mission, which is, you know, a very polite way of saying you want to stand on your own two feet, you want to do your own thing. I'm told there's some controversy inside of Microsoft about a line my colleague Hayden Field wrote in a piece describing Build. I'm just going to read this. This is from Hayden. It's a great line. She said, this year's Microsoft build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcee posting a thirst trap on Instagram, right? The breakup is completed. It's time to flex. Here's our new model. We're going to stand on our own two feet. You're out there saying you're going to build models at the frontier and compete with the leading labs. Is that the feeling inside of Microsoft? That you're free, you're free to be on your own?

• 13:43Speaker 05

  Definitely not. No, no, not at all. Look, I mean, obviously, this is a cool, cool headline and a fun phrase, but like the reality is we are in partnership with OpenAI for years and years to come. I mean, we're running way north of 2030. They still produce the best models in the world. Five five is an outstanding model. The codecs, the cybersecurity models that are coming through are amazing and they're powering the majority of what we do. So naturally that's going to continue.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  And so I think, you know, that's just the natural course of these sorts of partnerships. I don't think it's anything untoward or surprising. I think, you know, OpenAI is very understanding and supportive of that. I mean, they've obviously been incredibly fast growing company and they understand that we have to, you know, pursue our own agenda as well. So it's very normal.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  Let me ask you the other decoder question, then I want to get into the announcements at Build and certainly Superintelligence. The last time we spoke, you said your framework for making decisions operated on a six week cycle, given how fast AI was moving. That made sense then. Things have settled, maybe, that maybe some, maybe some things are more in focus. What is your decision making framework now?

• 14:51Speaker 05

  We still operate by the same cycle rhythm. The end of each cycle, we have a one week meetup in person. I'm a real believer in this, even though we're still an in office culture, four days a week.

• 15:05Speaker 05

  In fact, the week after next, you know, my entire Superintelligence team comes together in Boston, in person for four days. And that is for all of our retrospectives on how Build went, what we learned, what we didn't get right, what we need to improve, our planning for the next cycle, which is going to run for eight weeks this time with a one week meetup afterwards. And that's all laid out for the entire year. So the whole. Organization knows that that's the rhythm by which we operate. And I think it's actually really important to emphasize that timeframe because quarterly planning gets a little bit blurry and a bit abstract. And I think, you know, six to eight weeks, depending on where it falls in the calendar, is actually the optimal time for making very clear falsifiable missions.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  In addition to the cycle rhythm of these six to eight weeks cycles, we also operate by squads. Squads are mixed interdisciplinary subgroups that are focused on a specific mission and they don't necessarily ladder up to the manager. They actually are run by a DRI and the DRI is often an IC and their job-

• 16:11Speaker 04

  That's directly responsible individual and individual contributor.

• 16:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Thank you. And, you know, I think we've, we've taken the approach of separating the role of the manager from the role of the DRI that executes on a specific mission. And I think that's because being a great DRI is, is exhausting. You know, you're like literally all in 24 hours a day and you're pushing as hard as you possibly can. Being a manager is often, you know, about being a coach, offering support, giving guidance, feedback, unblocking, all sorts of things, helping with people's career growth. And so I think keeping those separate allows us to rotate DRIs every two or three cycles so that some people can try, you know, sort of different positions and have rotation.

• 16:56Speaker 05

  And it's a great, very flexible structure that allows us to be pretty nimble, I think.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Let's talk about build. I wanted to start with superintelligence. You've mentioned it several times now. I was just at Google I O, Demis Isabos, who used to be your colleague when you were at Google, ended that keynote by saying that we were in, quote, "the foothills of the singularity" and that AGI was coming with all the power of Google. You're saying superintelligence is here. Are these all the same things? Are we using a different language to describe AGI? Are there differences? How would you define superintelligence in your context versus the singularity in Demis's?

• 17:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously, I didn't say it was here, I said it's coming. And I think it's, obviously, there's a lot of like fluidity around these phrases.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  But I think what we can clearly see that's happening right now is that there is log linear hill climbing across all modalities. And that means that there is a very direct relationship between each order of magnitude of compute that we apply, each order of magnitude, or each incremental increase in data, and climbing on benchmarks, whether they're public benchmarks, internal benchmarks, they're, you know, targets that we focus on with reinforcement learning environments. And that is a very important observation. Those predictions that I think we're all making, I understand why some people are sort of skeptical of them or raise questions, but they're very grounded in the sort of empirical observations

• 18:26Speaker 05

  of over a decade of increase in performance of these models. I mean, essentially, the same general purpose architecture has seen 12 orders of magnitude more computation applied, trillion-fold increase in flops over 15 years. And basically, has worked in audio, in image, in text, in code, you know, in many other time series prediction tasks. And so we're basically extrapolating out that, you know, more orders of magnitude of compute will enable us to continue to climb in this log linear way inside of other environments. And then it raises the question of, are we going to be able to train models that can

• 19:07Speaker 05

  invent new knowledge, not just sort of extrapolate from existing data that we have, but actually teach us things that we don't know and make new discoveries? And then the second thing is, you know, do they have the capacity to, you know, self-improve and accelerate the process of deciding which hypotheses should be set, which ones should be pursued, how to generate training data for each of those, how to factor those into new runs, or even innovate on the actual architecture itself? So I think both of those things need to be true to be able to see this compounding progress. But I think we're going to continue to get massive gains just from Applying the next few orders of magnitude of compute and that probably does achieve parity

• 19:52Speaker 05

  with human performance on many, many more tasks, just as we've seen that happen in the last six months on coding.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  So coding is really interesting because it's easily validated, right? You write the code, you ask the computer to run it, it runs or fails. We've seen some of the downsides, certainly around security, right? The downsides are obvious and we're seeing this sort of regulatory approach to coding security play out in lots of ways. I've probably vibe coded some security disasters on my own phone and computer and that's, you know, maybe that's just a risk I'm willing to take. Every other function doesn't seem that easy. I always pick on law because, you know, that's my background, but a judge doesn't validate legal writing the way a computer validates code. Like if you get it wrong, the judge can send you to jail, right? That is maybe the worst output validation error that you can probably run into.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  How do you measure the effectiveness across domains as easily as you can measure the effectiveness in coding? Because this seems to me where the metaphor, the analogy to, from coding to other domains falls apart very quickly.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  I'm not so sure. So, I mean, coding, obviously you can verify the correct execution of code. It runs or it crashes. But there's a ton of nuance in that. The quality of the code that gets written really matters. It's extensibility, how reconfigurable it is, how useful it is in practice. It's not just that a piece of code runs, it's like, how does a model actually use it as a DevOps or an SRE in production to kind of return to that piece of code that it's written and then use it in a practical and useful way? And then, of course, you have to grade the quality of the output that has been produced. Like it may be high quality functioning code, but is it actually the app or the website that you wanted? And there are aesthetic judgments in that, there's commercial judgments in that.

• 21:41Speaker 05

  So the challenge of internalizing non-verifiable rewards is present in code, even though code is still primarily a verifiable reward signal. And I think the other thing to observe is that like chat is also a non-verifiable space and yet we've managed to climb that to basically human level performance through interaction with real world usage. That provides a very strong.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Wait, tell me how you measure, I'm very curious, how do you measure chat at human level performance?

• 22:06Speaker 05

  Well, so I think many people are having long conversations, meaningful conversations with AIs at human level performance. I mean, the quality is exceptionally good. It has very good emotional intelligence. It's broadly very accurate. We've minimized the hallucinations. We don't talk so much about bias anymore. It's grounded in real world observations. I think by most people's measures, we've got to, you know, human level performance in conversation for quite a wide range of tasks now.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  What are your measures? I'm actually, sure, most people's measures. I would disagree with almost all of this, but those are my measures. What are your measures?

• 22:45Speaker 05

  I mean, my measure is like when I turn to my assistant and ask it, you know, to provide me with a daily briefing summarizing all the conversations that have happened on Teams and on email, the updates that have happened to documents, and I get basically a synthesized summary with a set of actions that I should take next, which is basically better than what my chief of staff can produce. I would say that's human level performance in synthesis, you know, analysis, proposed actions, and chat. I mean, there are many, many millions of people every day that are using it for emotional support, for counseling, for therapy, for coaching, for advice. I think it's one of the most popular use cases inside all of the chatbots. So that's a pretty robust measure, I would say, to make the claim.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  I know you've spent a lot of time thinking about this, particularly the emotional connection to some of these chatbots. These are products that you have built and deployed. I would draw a pretty big distinction from this thing is really, really good at summarizing my email and task list and providing me a brief about what things to prioritize, and this thing is an emotional coach for somebody undergoing some kind of crisis. Like, those are not similar tasks. Those are not similar kinds of intelligence, even in people necessarily. I know some people who are very good at making lists and are very bad at emotional support. How do you put that all together in your brain and say, okay, this is broadly human level performance in chat?

• 24:07Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, I think if you define chat as an interactive exchange between two parties, one of which in this case is an AI, that broadly satisfies some goal. You're looking to learn the sports score, you're looking for advice on which restaurant to go to, you're looking for coaching and feedback on an essay that you've written, you're looking for suggestions about which job to, you know, take next, or some tough conversation you're about to have with your manager. You get a response, you go back and forth, you have five or six exchanges, and you find that a useful output, which you might otherwise have to go rely on an expert friend, or, you know, even pay a coach. There are, I mean, just objectively, empirically speaking, hundreds of millions of people that get that experience every day from these chatbots.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  So maybe we could quibble over whether that technically represents human-level performance. I think it's a fairly reasonable thing to claim, and, you know, I think there's no reason why that isn't going to continue climbing, right? I mean, the rate of climbing in the last three years is the thing that I think is most staggering. And so what we're trying to do from this point is extrapolate, okay, what are the fundamental drivers of that climb? Compute, data, interaction from real-world users, and, you know, those things look set to continue. So I think that I would expect that they apply to many other domains too, not just sort of, I don't know, chat or emotional support and productivity and, you know, and that kind of thing, but many other domains beyond that, to healthcare, you know, to

• 25:37Speaker 05

  live production deployments inside of education, you know, to assistants that are increasingly managing your home, you know, looking at your, you know, just everything that is in your everyday life, basically, to make you kind of more productive. So that's, I think, a trajectory that's likely to continue.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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• 27:42Speaker 04

  We're back with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. Well, this is interesting. You've mentioned now that it's still the same fundamental architecture, transformers, attention that we've been applying computer for 15 years. We're getting these big increases. You are in a fairly unique spot. At Build, you announced your first flagship reasoning model, MAI Thinking 1. You got to start from scratch. Is there anything you've done differently now, after 15 years in architecting and training this model? Or is it just, yep, we're going to collect all the data and run the training run just as we did, and we have more compute now, so it's going to be better?

• 28:17Speaker 05

  No, actually, I think there's actually quite a lot of differences. The first thing to say is that the way that you curate the data, we start right from the top of the stack, is that we basically have, you know, paid for and acquired an extremely high-quality, very conservative set of data, and extracted a lot of the noisy, distracting, low-quality, potentially security risk issues to do with that data. And the methods that you do for that, I think, are actually quite proprietary. We just shared a 109-page, very detailed technical report, which was very well received on Twitter, which shares a lot of the details

• 28:58Speaker 05

  on how we do this. I think the second thing is, whilst I think it's important to be quite cautious with architectural choices, and we have been, there are also a number of pretty significant shifts that I think we've made into how we put together our training runs. So our training runs have been incredibly stable, very few crashes, very few restarts. We shared a lot of those graphs to show infrastructure stability, and also MFU efficiency. So model flop utilization, which basically shows that we can put, you know, a basically state-of-the-art number of flops through each chip for every step in our training

• 29:38Speaker 05

  run. So I think that this is extremely easy to get wrong, and we all hear lots of stories from different labs about how things do go wrong. And it actually is pretty hard to make the very careful and deliberate choices to get things right and take the right approach to make sure we produce high-quality models. Because our job and our ambition is to try and build this hill-climbing machine. That means the integration of the silicon with the models, with the super-high-quality data, with a stack of RLEs, reinforcement learning environments, that allow us to basically systematically hill-climb against any objective that we choose. And that's what MAI Thinking 1 is.

• 30:20Speaker 05

  It's a general purpose, fairly neutral thinking model that is pretty good at coding. It's now roughly on par with Opus 4.6, at least on the benchmarks. We haven't deployed it at scale into production, so there's still lots more work to do there. But it's an extremely strong reasoner, 97% on AME, which is the primary measure for its reasoning performance, at least on the benchmarks. It's very good at instruction following, and then the goal is basically to make that available to many, many developers and enterprises and allow them to climb on it for their use cases, because everybody has a sort of slightly different objective that they have in their company to try and build, you know, agents and so on that support their use case.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  One of the things that you've noted in talking about AMI thinking one is that you didn't distill any existing models, which actually struck me as surprising, right? This is a thing you could do. You have access to OpenAI's IP. Everyone's distilling everything. We just found out in this trial that Grok was distilled from a number of models. Why not do distillation here? Why not jump ahead?

• 31:21Speaker 05

  So there's definitely lots of shortcuts to the frontier. And if you take a super high quality model and you sort of like polish your base model with high quality instructions or answers or outputs from a superior model, then it's true that the model might quickly fit to that distribution, but it's very unclear that they would then be able to surpass that teacher. And so we've been very deliberate for two reasons. The first is that we want to make sure that we can exceed the teacher in order to set the frontier ourselves over the next few years. And the second is that we really want to build one of the great labs. And it's going to take us, you know, many years to come, probably the next two, three

• 32:06Speaker 05

  years. But in order to do that, we have to be able to show that we can actually build every component ourselves, we can hire the very best talent in the world. We can push the frontier with actual research rather than just reimplementation, copying or distillation from any other third party. And we're in a great position where we're able to really carefully and meticulously pursue that objective, knowing that we have the resources to buy anthropic models where they sort of exceed the frontier. We have the resources to, you know, put 11,000 different models inside a foundry. So every one of our developers gets pure optionality. And of course, we have the resources, you know, to continue to deploy OpenAI models,

• 32:49Speaker 05

  which are obviously outstanding and are at the frontier today. So that's just a natural part of the self-sufficiency mission and it'll take a time for us to, you know, truly get to the absolute frontier on that. But I think we're in a great spot. We made a ton of progress. I mean, this is a very, very strong model and it wasn't just that model that we released. We've released seven new models simultaneously. Our transcribe model, for example, 1.5 is literally the number one in the world. It's the most cost effective of any of the hyperscalers. It's the highest on accuracy. Our image model is now number two. Our image editing model is number three, right behind, you know, Google and OpenAI. So I think we're well up there with our image and audio.

• 33:31Speaker 05

  Our code model, code flash is incredibly strong, optimized for VS code. You know, really, really a great model that's on par with Sonnet, you know, four, six. So it's, it's really in a great spot. That's been it.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Were there any legal or IP concerns with distillation? I know this is a, a live issue like out in the world, you know, anthropic complaints of other people distilling their models. There's concerns about Chinese companies distilling models and whether our existing IP agreements can cover that. Did you have any of those concerns to keep you away from it?

• 34:00Speaker 05

  No, we didn't, but I, I think I understand why a lot of people get frustrated. I mean, anthropic have been very frustrated and some of the rumors around XAI and Meta and obviously the open source models and so on, because essentially that's basically taking the IP and the knowledge that another team has put together and then literally sort of force feeding it into your own model. I, I think it's a bit of a short term. It's a short term win. And, you know, like I said, I mean, really, we want to create a culture in the lab where we can come up with the next big thinking breakthrough, or the next big coding breakthrough, or the next big architectural, you know, push. I mean, right now, we're experimenting with a loop transformer, which is a slightly different variant on the current transformer.

• 34:44Speaker 05

  Lots of people in the field are looking at it, too. No, no one seems to have quite got into production yet. But in order to create a culture and a team that, um, you know, can really push the frontier, they have to, uh, you know, understand, own and create the full stack as and when they need to, and also use things from third parties whenever we need to, too. And like our, our paper, for example, has hundreds of citations grounded in the rest of the literature. So it's very much a contribution back to the field in return for everything that we've learned over the years from all the great publications that have been out there.

• 35:15Speaker 04

  Can I ask you, if you understand that frustration from Anthropic and your peers in AI about distillation, do you also understand the frustration from creatives and publishers and YouTubers about all the AI companies scraping their work as a collective to make these models? Because that frustration is only getting louder.

• 35:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I, I understand the frustration. The, the open web, uh, challenge is one we've talked about before. And I get it, and I, I see that people are frustrated. And obviously, that's working its way through the conversation in the courts. And, um, you know, I see that, you know, people put things online and, you know, they had different expectations about what the contract was with that being placed online. And it's, it's, it's a tricky one.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  You mentioned all your data was carefully curated. Did you pay for all the data that you're using to train the new models?

• 36:04Speaker 05

  I mean, a lot of our data, we obviously take from the open web in the normal way. Um, carefully curated means it is extremely carefully filtered uh, for security, uh, for quality, for, you know, third-party dependencies from some of the open source data sets. Um, you know, keeping it away from a lot of the Chinese lineages, which I think are very different. Our enterprises want to make sure that when they put something into production, they can trust us that we've really built it with their needs in mind. And I think it's This is one of the, you know, benefits, I think, of being very, very deliberate and patient and being attentive to all the details.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  You mentioned enterprise. I think this is very interesting. Microsoft is all in on enterprise AI. In big ways, actually, I would even draw the line straight to Asha Sharma, the new head of Xbox, is getting rid of AI in a bunch of places and the gamers are happy, right? There's, there's one reaction to AI in consumer space. There's another in enterprise. And I think AI has as close to product market fit in enterprise as you can get with something as changing as fast as AI. There are a bunch of databases that corporations control and you can just go access them because they control them. That's their data. There's a bunch of repeatable processes and tasks and old systems that maybe the models can just do more efficiently. There's something very important happening to enterprise.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  At the same time, the consumer antipathy towards AI is just increasing. And, you know, my argument is we have not built great consumer AI products. This industry has not produced them. It has not shifted them. It has not made it obvious that all of this is worth it, that using all the data from the open web and changing the contract of publishing to a mass audience of people. So now it's being used for training of models that will deliver trillions of dollars of value to corporations. There isn't a product that says this is worth it. Again, Satya Nadella recently gave an interview with Axios and he said, we need social permission for this. And until we have it, until we deliver that value, people are going to feel this way. We've seen college speakers get booed. We've seen data centers get banned.

• 38:08Speaker 04

  Do you think that there's a consumer product that's worth it, that's worth the angst about training, that's worth the angst about data centers? That was your focus. Now your focus is enterprise. I would say that, just on the face of it, it doesn't seem like Microsoft has interest in the consumer product anymore. But do you see one that's worth it or that could be built?

• 38:25Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm not sure I agree with you that there hasn't been any value for the consumer out of this. I mean, there's billion, across all of the chatbots, there's like billions of people a month that are getting immense value out of it. Now, like, just for a moment, you know, empathize a little bit with the, you know, small scale business owner or, you know, the kind of mom that's like helping her kid with the homework and can now just turn to a conversational AI and get like feedback, get instructions, get essay questions set. I mean, just being able to like ask

• 39:04Speaker 05

  Essentially questions about, you know, how do I kind of like generate revenue? How do I put together a cash flow forecast? Which college should I apply to? I mean, these are everyday tasks that, you know, are coming with some pretty high quality, you know, factual advice and information. So I don't really buy that people are not getting benefit out of these things. I think they are.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  But I think I can very clearly make the argument that they're not getting enough benefit. Right?

• 39:31Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  They're the ones saying that we should not have more data centers. They are the ones booing AI at the graduation speeches. The polling is clear, particularly young people. The more they use AI, the more antipathy they have towards it. That's clear in every single poll. That's the argument I'm making, not that there's no value, but the value exchange is not clear enough.

• 39:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, fair enough.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  I'm seeing Microsoft in particular pivot to enterprise away from, you know, the big search product, the reinvention of Bing that would make Google dance. Like, that's over. And we're all focused on enterprise where the value is. I'm just wondering if there's, there's value enough for the consumer to make all of this worth it.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think there's understandably a lot of anxiety. There's enormous amount of speculation about what's going to happen in the next five to 10 years, whether it's framed as the singularity or whether it's framed as the job apocalypse. You know, these are not helpful framings. I, I think that people are scared because it's poorly defined and it's often framed as an inevitable threatening gray cloud over people's heads. I think that what matters is what we do with technology. And I think that I've for a long time argued that we have to place the human first.

• 40:49Speaker 05

  You know, some people in the field have placed scientific discovery first or placed, you know, accelerating, you know, intelligences that can explore the galaxies and so on and said, you know, that it's inevitable that we're going to have. These AIs that are going to be more powerful than all of us combined. I mean, that's naturally scary to people. And I think that we have to basically flip it the other way around and say, the purpose of science and technology is to make us all healthier and smarter and happier. And that's been the quest that we've been on as a species for, you know, thousands of years of invention. And it's the test that we should put superintelligence to again.

• 41:31Speaker 05

  And if it doesn't achieve that test, then I think people will reject it and they'll be right to reject it. And, you know, I think that everybody's focus is now going to turn in the next five years to, how is this making me healthier and happier, smarter, more capable, more productive? And if it's not doing that, then naturally people are going to be angry and, and, and resist and react. And I don't think there is anything unexpected about that or anything wrong about that. I think that's inevitable. So that's why one of the things I've been passionate about for many, many years is healthcare. And, you know, just a couple of days ago, we announced a new partnership with Mayo Clinic. This is the number one hospital in the world, consistently reported.

• 42:17Speaker 05

  They have the, you know, highest quality longitudinal patient record data set across all the modalities. They have the best clinical practice and we are gonna, they're also a nonprofit, which I think a lot of people don't realize. Sixty-five percent of their patient population is on Medicaid. People often associate them with the super elites flying in internationally to get the best care in the world. But they actually have majority on Medicaid. They're an amazing institution with an incredible mission to deliver the best healthcare everywhere. And we now have a very long-term partnership to co-train from scratch with their data, with our models, a brand new model for, you know, a brand new foundation model for health, deploy it in their hospitals and hopefully take it around the world to deliver the best, you know,

• 43:03Speaker 05

  clinical care and, and, and healthcare that we possibly can to as many, as many, many people as possible. That's why I got in the field. You know, that's what I was originally motivated by, so I'm passionate by, about. And, you know, I, I can only focus on the things that I think are going to make a difference and that will help people and, you know, leave a good legacy for everybody. And that, that's what we're trying to do.

• 43:26Speaker 04

  We need to take another quick break. We'll be back in a minute.

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• 45:12Speaker 04

  We're back with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. I appreciate that. I appreciate the healthcare framing and I understand why that's everyone's go to, right? Healthcare in America in particular, if you could make it even 10% better, you will have affected a lot of people's lives in a particularly profound way. The thing is, I know a very smart guy who has a very different and vastly more aggressive approach to all of this than you. That person is you, four months ago. This is what Mustafa Suleyman said to the Financial Times four months ago. "White collar work, when you're sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer, or an accountant, or a product manager, or a marketing person, most of these tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months." This is four months ago. That implies that a year from now, lawyers, accountants,

• 45:56Speaker 04

  product managers, and marketing people will not have jobs, right? Their jobs will be automated. Is that still your timeline?

• 46:02Speaker 05

  No, no, no. Hold on a sec. So I said tasks. In the quote that you've just said, I said tasks. So that does not mean jobs. Very important distinction. In labor economics, there is an entire taxonomy of subcomponents of a role, of a function in organization. Sending an email, having a conversation with a colleague, putting together a PowerPoint. Subtasks will increasingly become digitized, automated, and we can basically generate more and more of them. That does not necessarily mean that the role goes away at all. It just means that the work can be done faster and more efficiently,

• 46:45Speaker 05

  which is today often work that is quite rote, is quite manual, is quite labor-intensive, is time-consuming. And so the natural progression of technology is to make your life easier, faster, less frictionful, more seamless. As everyone often complains, that has made you and me and everybody else much more busy. It's actually made us more available, more stressed, it's given us more information, right? So there's always these revenge effects of efficiency, which I think people forget. It's quite likely that we're going to get made much, much more productive because we spend less time doing the kind of narrow administrative menial tasks, and we'll have to spend more time doing creative, judgment-focused things,

• 47:31Speaker 05

  which ultimately create a lot more value. We can also experiment much more quickly, so we'll be able to try lots of things out in parallel because the cost of execution is going to get lower. My mind, that's likely to increase the overall quality of things because we're going to try out more hypotheses, whether in... Journalism or in business or in anything that we do. So I think that that they're sort of slightly taken out of context because of a natural misunderstanding between jobs and tasks. But nevertheless, you could push back at me and say, okay, well, then what does the landscape look like in five or 10 or 15 years' time? And that's where I think we have to return.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  But actually, can I, I'm not going to push back on you in that way. I'm going to push back in a very specific way. And I realize this is your quote and you're saying it was misinterpreted. I'm just looking at this literal sentence and there is no distinction between tasks and subtasks. It is white collar work. The examples are lawyer, accountant, product manager, uh, marketing person. And then, and then you said, most of these tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months. That, that's, there's no distinction of subtasks there.

• 48:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this is a task.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  You're saying most lawyers will have their jobs fully automated and then the practice of law will look totally different within a year. Even, even by the words of that quote. And I'm just saying, we're, are you still on that timeline that, that being a lawyer will look totally different because Asians will be running around doing everything that we were doing before?

• 48:48Speaker 05

  Well, most of the tasks means work that you do in order to get your overall job done. And that I think is going to free you up to do the more human-like and the more judgment parts of your work. And that's, that's, there's a very important distinction in, you know, jobs and roles are the broader category, tasks are the components of that. And it's a, it's an established definition in the literature in labor market economics for many, many decades. It was maybe too nuanced even for the Financial Times, but, but nevertheless, that was the intent. Now, I do think there's an important question around where does that leave us in the longer term? And it is going to be challenging, like more and more of this stuff. We can quibble over the timelines of whether it's a few years or whether it's a decade

• 49:33Speaker 05

  or whether it's 20 years. But the reality is we are going to be automating more and more of this, uh, work, tasks, jobs, roles, activity and everything that we do. And so what's going to matter more is the governance that we put around these technologies. Who are they accountable to? Who owns them? What are the feedback loops that regulate and introduce friction to make sure that they actually serve people? I mean, I wrote an essay on humanist superintelligence outlining quite directly four or five months ago, what I think of as basically a North Star. Maybe not quite a framework, but a set of principles that basically says, technology is here to serve us. That's the test that we should put it to. It's the test that people put it to.

• 50:18Speaker 05

  It's the test that we care about and Microsoft. And I think that more and more, everyone's going to have to really focus on that question because it is going to deliver a tremendous amount of good and we want it to continue doing that. But we wanted to do it in a way that doesn't sort of cause, you know, ridiculous amounts of instability during the transitionary period.

• 50:38Speaker 04

  I believe you. I know you've been thinking about this stuff for a long time, but I'm going to, I'm going to respond in the way that I know my audience wants me to respond because I hear it from them all the time. And what it looks like is this whole industry, you, everybody included, went all in on, we're going to replace all the jobs and really accelerating and building out data centers at massive capacity and asking for a lot of resources against big promises. There was political pushback and now all of the stances have softened. And you know, you saying it's not all jobs are going away, we have to rethink jobs is of a piece with all the other CEOs in this industry saying similar things and talking about healthcare that comes up every single time now. And I'm wondering if that political pushback has actually changed how you are talking about this.

• 51:23Speaker 04

  There's a lot of your peers who think AI simply has a marketing problem that hasn't been communicated effectively enough and they should spend hundreds of millions of dollars on podcasts to communicate the benefits of AI more effectively. This is a real thing that is happening in this industry. Do you think AI simply has a marketing problem and that the political pushback has opened your eyes to this marketing problem? Or do you think there's something else going on?

• 51:46Speaker 05

  There's a series of questions there. The first is, what do I actually think and believe? And has it changed in the last six months? The answer is no. I wrote a very detailed book about this three years ago, way ahead of time, warning about many of the things that are currently happening. And doing so explicitly to lay on the table tremendous risks to surveillance, to concentration of power, to concentration of wealth, to disintermediation of the state, to threats to democracy, to threats to the nature of the human and what it means to be a person in the context of the arrival of these very new forms of silicon being in some sense.

• 52:31Speaker 05

  And I've been working on the idea that my healthcare interest is just a flash in the pan, which is a function of the reactions to data centers and so on. I mean, I've been working on healthcare for over a decade and pushed many, many times on some of the cutting edge breakthroughs, contributions to the field in radiology, mammography, and pathology, many other areas, electronic health records. So I've always believed that the purpose of technology is to just make us healthier and happier. And those are the things that I choose to work on and direct my time to. Does the industry have a reputation and PR problem? I mean, I think it's pretty clear that people are very anxious. They're very frustrated. And there's going to be a lot of attention on that

• 53:16Speaker 05

  in the next few years, understandably. But I think what we can do is take accountability of the things that we build, the way we build them, the decisions that we make to put types of technology out in the world and the types of problems that we choose to work on, like we are doing with the Mayo Clinic.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I want to, by the way, say and point out that I think the first time you and I ever met and talked was before you joined Microsoft. It was right after that book came out and we did a panel together. So one of the reasons I'm comfortable asking this is because I do know that you've been thinking about this for a long time. And I'm aware of that book. I think for me, the question is whether the industry as a whole misjudged the total amount of value it can provide to overcome the seeming recklessness that people are now reacting to, that ask for resources that people are now reacting to. And you're building new models. There's probably a trade off inside of Microsoft between we can use the existing Azure footprint. To charge our customers money, or we can spend money to train new models.

• 54:20Speaker 04

  And that kind of looks like the same conversation people are having at resources in their communities. Whether we should use the existing energy footprint to build new AI or do something else that might be more immediately valuable. How do you think about all of that, right? You're you are one of the leaders of this industry. You want to be on the frontier with the the companies driving the most change. How do you think about asking for those resources in a way that isn't just promising future results, but also immediately providing benefits to communities in a way that makes people want you to be there?

• 54:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think that I'm I'm very proud that Microsoft has stuck by its net zero targets. Our new data centers are all liquid cooled. This means that they use about a restaurant's worth of water for a six year period. It's like a swimming pool that gets filled up with water and then it just circulates around the system. They're all largely renewable in terms of their electricity consumption. So I think commitments like that to make sure, for example, we made a commitment recently to ensure that local communities affected by shift in electricity demand by our data centers

• 55:34Speaker 05

  are compensated and protected so that they don't see a spike in their prices, their energy bills. Those are the kinds of things that I think Microsoft does and can continue doing as a responsible company to just really pay attention to the consequences for communities. And I think on the flip side, you know, change happens because people participate at every level. People inside of companies have to make different decisions. People who protest and campaign have to make decisions and make the effort to go out and make their voice heard and be involved in a political process. And that's how we as a species collectively evolve and move things forward.

• 56:16Speaker 05

  And month to month, quarter to quarter, it feels like we're all kind of at odds with one another. But when you look back decade over decade, we're kind of like this, you know, collective weird kind of mesh of all sorts of different incentives that are just actually nudging things in the right direction. And we really are, I think, despite, you know, all of the angst and the polarization, I think we're building something that is going to make our species much, much more healthier and happier and more capable. And I think that we have to make sure we get the right path on the way there because there's lots of like pitfalls and ways that it can go wrong. But the right path involves, you know, people making their voices heard and people changing

• 57:00Speaker 05

  course based on a response and reaction to that. So I think it's, it's a good thing that that's happening and that's the process working as intended.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  Let me ask you about the, the enterprise side of this. We've spent a long time on the consumer side and how people feel. On the enterprise side, we're seeing a bunch of companies figure out how valuable these tools actually are, right? Amazon basically took down a leaderboard because people were cheating to use more tokens than they needed. We've seen some companies just blow out their token budgets. I think Uber just pulled back because they'd blown through their token allocation for the year and they, they weren't seeing any value from it. How do you think about that side of it right now, where there's so much excitement and so much desire for change in the enterprise, or in particular, software engineering, at least some people are having fun and maybe some other people are having full existential crises, but some people are having fun and the value hasn't still been realized, right?

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Or we're beginning to see pure token maxing does not actually deliver the same kind of value that maybe you'd expect. How, how do you think about the use there? Because that's, maybe if you prove it out in enterprise, it will actually come out in other ways.

• 58:06Speaker 05

  I think different people report different things. So there's obviously some examples of people overusing coding models, generating, you know, useless code, useless, you know, tokens. But there's many people whose work and impact has been completely transformed by it, right? So, I mean, There's no question that this has had a massively beneficial impact on the software engineering industry. I mean, we are producing much more high quality, much faster code across the entire stack. And so, yeah, I kind of think there's obviously examples of some people that maybe got it wrong, didn't set the right token budgets. Maybe, you know, there's going to be mistakes along the way. And I think that's any signal that there isn't adoption or people don't see value.

• 58:51Speaker 05

  I mean, the value from where I'm sitting is incredible. Many, many people tell me every single day that it's transforming their work output and productivity. I think the other thing to say is that like, these things happen in like surges, there's kind of a swell of energy. It gets all a bit frothy. People pull back a few months later and realize that actually that isn't the thing. And then they head in a slightly different direction. So it's a bit meandering and organic and, you know, I think that's inevitable. There's a lot of excitement, so people make big claims on Twitter and so on. But actually, the steady march of progress looks very, very linear and continuous.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  I agree with that on the whole. Where it doesn't look linear to me is in the form factors of computers. Right, there's probably more form factor experimentation right now than in any point in the last 10 years. Right, we've mostly settled on the smartphone for at least the last 10 years. We're seeing different AI wearables, weird glasses, maybe will be everyone's favorite device. I have my doubts. Microsoft showed off some new devices at Build. There was the badge that controls an agent and the little, for lack of a better word, the chumby, the little desktop friendly thing that controls an agent. I was a big chumby fan. I got my career started writing about chumby's friend gadget. It was the first thing that came to mind.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  All of those, to me, I look at them and I think, where does the compute live? Where does the logic live? That's up for grabs now in a way that isn't just the linear march of progress, right? If all of my computing happens in the cloud on cloud-based applications and it's just agents running around to data stored elsewhere in the cloud. And all I need is a credit card on a lanyard to issue instructions to. That changes the entire architecture of computing, right? It might change the entire architecture of the modern civilization in like many ways, right? If we don't all have smartphones. How do you think about that? Where is that going? Is that up for grabs or is it will be a hybrid approach? Where do you see the appropriate end stage?

• 1:00:53Speaker 05

  Hmm. Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, I think that both things are going to happen at the same time. The edge is going to get way more powerful. And the cloud is still going to be the primary driver of the largest models. And so increasingly, your agent will be smart enough to know that it can answer the question, what is the capital of France on device? Whether it's on your, you know, glasses, wristbands, you know, on your badge or in your earbuds. And then it will know when it doesn't know. It'll know that this is actually a pretty complicated question. Or it's an action that requires, you know, a whole bunch of sequences of steps to be generated, or it requires novel code to be written and it will turn to the cloud.

• 1:01:37Speaker 05

  So this kind of like switching hybrid thing is going to be super important. The other thing is we've, I mean, we've already sort of seen it in the last three or four months is that like we can have pretty powerful local machines that can do async background processing. They can like constantly monitor systems if you need them to. They can do, do tasks that can afford to take 10 hours, run much, much more slowly than they otherwise would be if they were in a supercomputer. So, you know, naturally when we're like swamped with demand, then that, that demand finds loads of nooks and crannies to kind of get satisfied by. I'm actually very excited by the, the badge that we're building. I mean, it's pretty cool. Like this is a technology that basically everyone in a major company has.

• 1:02:23Speaker 05

  You know, it hasn't evolved in 25, 30 years.

• 1:02:28Speaker 05

  You know, we definitely have to wear it. It's provided by the company itself, by the CISA. So like up leveling that and actually making it a pretty cool, open platform that's programmable that other people can build on top of. I think it's a cool idea. I think this is going to work, so I'm very excited by it.

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, the thing that strikes me is there's no way you can put a bunch of high-powered local compute in a badge. That thing applies to all the computers elsewhere.

• 1:02:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, you're definitely going to have some local compute. You're going to have a local classifier, just as you do on your earbuds at the moment. I mean, you're going to have local classifiers. It's going to have wake words. You know, it's going to have its own camera. So, you know, I think that increasingly, these things are just going to become vessels for processing power that happens in a kind of nested chain of increasingly less powerful devices to go right to the endpoint.

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. Do you think the phone has a future in that? I mean, build is right in the middle of I O and W W C. These are big companies that control phone platforms. They love talking with how the phone platforms will stay at the center. The argument I hear from so many is that actually, AI is a platform shift that might totally displace the phone.

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  I think the history of technology teaches us that basically, as things get more useful, they get cheaper, they proliferate, and they spawn new uses of technology. So I think we've become so used to the phone that everyone just assumes that this is going to be an anchor device for the rest of history. But actually, many of the features and functionality of your phone, I think, are going to get disintermediated, broken apart, and stored on smaller devices. Right now, the primary function that the phone is playing, in my opinion, is verification. It's functioning as your ID card, doing your face recognition to auth you into various different environments. I think you can well imagine that being a much cheaper, smaller, you know, secure

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

  device which disconnects you from your phone. And then, you know, communication taking place via voice or even via like a series of ambient sensors where your AI doesn't really live on a device. It's actually just, you know, with you wherever you are, appearing, you know, on the bathroom mirror, wherever it is. You know, I think it's like you can imagine it feeling much more immersive, not in the next like three to five years, but looking much further out.

• 1:04:53Speaker 05

  And I think that the infrastructure to support that kind of, you know, encrypted but distributed appearance of agents is probably going to end up emerging in the 2030s.

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. Let me ask you two final questions to wrap up. You mentioned that it's the same architectures that we've been using. I have a lot of open questions about whether LLMs basically are the path to AGI. And you know, things I would point to is they don't actually know anything. Like at this point, even Microsoft Research is pointing out that they don't know anything. And that leads to certain kinds of mistakes and certain kinds of applications. Are LLMs the path to AGI or superintelligence?

• 1:05:34Speaker 05

  Look, I think we probably need a couple more big breakthroughs. But it doesn't mean that we're going to see a slowdown in performance improvements over the next few years, which I think is kind of a difficult distinction for people to grasp. Like, one thing to say is human level performance across most tasks is still very far from superintelligence. You know, a superintelligence is a general purpose learner that can basically immediately understand a brand new domain, which is out of distribution. So it needs to be able to learn in a novel environment from scratch because it has a

• 1:06:17Speaker 05

  stored representation of, you know, like valuable knowledge, conceptual knowledge.

• 1:06:25Speaker 05

  And at the moment, we haven't really fully tested that. The agents aren't general purpose. They're actually, although they're broad and often integrated, they're kind of domain specific. I mean, we're using them for chat, we're using them for coding, we're using them for image, audio.

• 1:06:41Speaker 05

  Now, obviously, as a, as a human, we do many, many other tasks that are much broader and more wide ranging. I think that's why people are pushing on world models and, you know, sort of much more immersive, real world, interactive agents that see the kind of full distribution of tasks or, you know, experiences that I have during a day. So I think that it's enough to take us a very long way in the next three years, the next three orders of magnitude of compute. And yet, you know, full superintelligence beyond that is, is still an open question as to whether LLMs are enough or we need other things. I think it's not quite true that they don't know anything or they don't have knowledge. They clearly are a store of knowledge. They're a highly compressed representation of knowledge. They just do so in a different way to a traditional relational database in a much

• 1:07:25Speaker 05

  more fluid, flexible sort of abstract way that, you know, is, is actually very useful. We want that ambiguity in the internal representation.

• 1:07:35Speaker 05

  So, you know, and, and increasingly, they're learning to use traditional tools. That's the other thing to kind of grasp a little bit is that. It may be that the neural network, combined with the existing stores of knowledge and the existing tools that have been created elsewhere in the digital ecosystem, is enough to bootstrap it up to, you know, improve its performance significantly. So there's just a lot of like, highly valuable, highly effective pieces that are already on the table, which are in the process of being connected together in the next few years. And I think that's going to drive like the progress that we're all excited about.

• 1:08:11Speaker 04

  One of the things that I think is just very funny in the industry right now is, if you ask Anthropic if Claude is alive, they will sort of get very frustrated that you're talking about the word alive, which they interpret to mean flesh and blood. And then they will not say whether or not they think Claude is conscious. And so they've drawn, I think, for the first time in human history, a distinction between being alive and being conscious. And they think Claude is conscious but not alive, or they don't know if Claude is conscious. Where are you? Do you think the models have consciousness? Do you think they're alive? Do you think they have the potential to achieve these things?

• 1:08:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I take the other side of that debate. I mean, I published a paper on seemingly conscious AI, warning about the risks of misrepresenting these models as conscious. I think it's very dangerous. I also published an article in Nature making the same claim. And I think that it's almost as though some of the folks at Anthropic have anthropomorphized the design of Claude so much, that it has then gone and wireheaded them and kind of tricked them into believing that it has these glimmers of consciousness that they put into it in the first place. In their constitution, for example, they

• 1:09:27Speaker 05

  actually, which is the training manual that they use to teach Claude what it can and can't do. It's not just a rulebook. It's actually a training guide that's part of their process. You know, in that manual, they actually speculate about Claude's welfare, about Claude's own rights to prior versions of itself, and actually say that they would consult Claude before deleting or turning off prior versions. You know, they speculate about its consciousness and whether, you know, it has those feelings and is aware. I think that's really, really dangerous. Firstly, it's a philosophical failing because they've treated the constitution as a

• 1:10:08Speaker 05

  place for speculation like you would in an academic paper rather than a training manual. So Claude has then gone and internalized those ideas about itself in its own training. But second, I think this is highly undesirable. This is exactly what we don't want from AIs. We want AIs to be controllable, contained, accountable, aligned tools that serve humanity. That's the project of humanist superintelligence. I think that's what we should all be pursuing. We do not want to have to contend with a superintelligence that has ideas about its own suffering, about ideas about its own feeling. And then beyond that, I think it's actually pretty clear that these models don't experience suffering. I think suffering is the primary definition of what it means to be a conscious being.

• 1:10:53Speaker 05

  And I think it's inherently biological. I don't think there is any pain network or feedback loop inside of the models which connects outside sensory networks to, you know, an evolved sense of what is right or wrong through harm and experimentation. I mean, that's just not how these models are trained. So I think it's like very dangerous to project potential rights onto beings, tools, agents that are, you know, have the potential to be like significantly more capable than us in, you know, many respects. So I think that's going to become the big debate. I mean, it was even part of the Pope's encyclical recently. I think it's going to become a very, very big part of the debate soon. And, you know, I've talked to Dario a lot about it in the past.

• 1:11:37Speaker 05

  He knows that we have slightly different views on it. And I think they're, they're very humble. I think they're very open minded and I think they're good citizens trying to do the right thing. They're good people and I, I think they're, they're, they're very open to feedback and iteration.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I think I agree with you. I would just push back ever so slightly. I don't think it. Suffering is easy. It's very easy to make someone else suffer. It's very difficult to make someone else feel joy, or at least slightly more difficult than suffering. And I would just offer you, I think it's, it's, it's actually the happiness that defines the consciousness. The suffering is, is almost trivial. I have two young children. They're very good at making each other suffer. But this is like, almost the easiest thing that they do. It's very hard to do the other thing. Let me ask you one final question. I just want to come back around. Again, a couple of weeks ago, I was at Google. I saw Demis Hassabis say, we are in the foothills of the singularity. You've talked a lot here about superintelligence, and how it should be built. You've talked a lot about your lengthy history, talking

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  about discussing and researching and writing about how superintelligence should be built, your disagreements with others in the industry. Do you agree that we're in the foothills of the singularity? Or is your vision somewhat different?

• 1:12:48Speaker 05

  I think we are definitely on a path to creating more and more powerful systems. I think that the transition that we have to make as a species is that for the first time in the history of humanity, the job is going to switch from inventing new science and unleashing all of those technical applications as fast as possible, as broadly as possible, to now thinking very carefully about what should we invent? And that's a very hard thing for the world to wrap their head around, because, you know, invention has been the engine of progress forever. So it's like, how could we possibly think, okay, well, maybe this time is different. Maybe we have to be exceptionally careful here. And to be clear,

• 1:13:31Speaker 05

  I don't think this is something that is going to knock on the door in the next five years. I think what Demis is referring to in the singularity is something that at least my take is, you know, decades away. And again, that's different to a superintelligence. A singularity is the point at which a superintelligence can recursively self-improve, and essentially infinitely exponentially grow its capabilities. So I think that's a long way off, and maybe we're in the foothills of a climb to Mount Everest, and I think it's going to take a lot longer from here. But the real question is, how are we going to govern it? How are we going to control it? And how are we going to make sure that it serves humanity, and not end up causing us more harm than good?

• 1:14:14Speaker 04

  Can you just do me one favor? I think I've got it. But can you just offer me a tight definition of what you think superintelligence is, what you think AGI is, and what you think the singularity is?

• 1:14:25Speaker 05

  I think artificial general intelligence is the point at which we can achieve most human tasks by an AI. So it's going to be as good at most people at most things. That's the kind of first rung on the ladder. A superintelligence is where it's not just at parity with human performance on all tasks, but it can dramatically exceed human performance on cross many of those tasks, and it can discover new knowledge by itself. So this is the point at which it's a true scientist, teaching us new things that weren't in the training data, hopefully inventing new molecules, new material science, et cetera, et cetera. The singularity is a point way beyond that, where a superintelligence

• 1:15:06Speaker 05

  can actually self-improve itself. And this is very sci-fi, but it's like infinitely, you know, accelerate towards this singular moment where, you know, just, I don't know, goes off into infinity or something. It's not really a, I don't know. It's just, it's a little bit too wacky for my taste.

• 1:15:24Speaker 04

  This is why I asked. I could tell there was something more nebulous there. It was a little hazy. Mustafa, I could obviously talk to you about this stuff for hours and hours longer. You're gonna have to come back sooner than this last turn. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

• 1:15:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's been fun. Thanks for loving me, like. Yeah, see you soon.

• 1:15:42Speaker 04

  I'd like to thank Mustafa Suleyman for taking the time to speak with me, and thank you for listening to Decoder. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. Decoder's on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're also at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with a five-star review. The show is produced by Kate Cox, Nick Statt. This episode is edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

• 1:16:50Speaker 07

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