No Priors // Will Everyone Have a Personal AI? With Mustafa Suleyman, Founder of DeepMind and Inflection

Key Points

• The guest Mustafa Suleyman co-founded DeepMind and is now CEO of Inflection, which just launched its first product, Pi, last week.
• The conversation covers Mustafa's background working on a Muslim youth helpline and as a negotiator and facilitator, his interest in AI and how that led to the founding of DeepMind.
• The conversation covers the initial framing of the DeepMind project with a focus on simulation-based games and the development of a thesis around artificial general intelligence with a key emphasis on the ability to perform well across a wide range of problems.
• The conversation then shifts to a discussion of the definition of intelligence, with a suggestion that the ability to direct attention or processing power to the salient features of an environment given some context may be another valuable definition of intelligence beyond generality. The development of a router or central brain as a key decision maker to direct different systems specialized in various areas is suggested as an engineering problem that could help unlock this field.
• The core thesis of deep mind is transfer learning to solve urgent global challenges using artificial intelligence.
• The future interface is conversation, and personal AI such as Pi will bring fluent natural language answers and feedback.
• The concept of personal AI, or PII, aligned to individuals' interests rather than businesses or political groups, is the future of computing and will fundamentally change the structure of the internet. It will also shift the way content is produced and curated.
• There is a responsibility for transparency and democratic oversight in the development and use of AI, which will be powerful systems with the potential for biased or harmful outcomes if not accountable to democratic structures. Improvement in AI is measured by emotional intelligence, fluidity of conversation, and even-handedness.
• The goal of Inflection.AI's Pi is to become the user's personal digital assistant that can make decisions, manage domestic life, access real-time web content, and store personal information to be super useful to the user.
• Inflection.AI is an applied AI company that has a small team of talented AI scientists and engineers who work with state-of-the-art language models, and they have a company goal of shipping every six weeks, with a focus on ICs and self-direction.

Episode Description

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how his interests in counseling, conflict resolution, and intelligence led him to start an AI lab that pioneered deep reinforcement learning, lead applied AI and policy efforts at Google, and more recently found Inflection and launch Pi. Mustafa offers insights on the changing structure of the web, the pressure Google faces in the age of AI personalization, predictions for model architectures, how to measure emotional intelligence in AIs, and the thinking behind Pi: the AI companion that knows you, is aligned to your interests, and provides companionship. Sarah and Elad also discuss Mustafa’s upcoming book, The Coming Wave (release September 12, 2023), which examines the political ramifications of AI and digital biology revolutions. No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode.