DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman predicts that by 2029, AI will have the capability to invent, market, and run businesses, with these technologies becoming widely accessible and affordable.
DeepMind co-founder and Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said the next five years will be revolutionary for the business world.
The artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer recently spoke at the World Economic Forum (WEF) during a panel discussion. Suleyman, in his speech, told audience members that he believed that an artificial intelligence system could invent, manufacture, market, and sell a product, essentially running its own business before 2030.
DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool" https://t.co/yWM5BpASMT pic.twitter.com/ia5bLXMQ1H
— Gizmodo (@Gizmodo) January 19, 2024
Where does Suleyman stand?
Suleyman said he’s pretty sure that within the next five years, certainly before the end of the decade, we are going to have not just those capabilities but those capabilities widely available for very cheap, potentially even in open source.
While many would refer to a machine capable of such feats as an artificial general intelligence (AGI), the artificial intelligence pioneer declined to engage on that subject. He called the term AGI a hazy concept and said it was “pretty unclear.”
Additionally, he said during the 2024 Davos panel that the term “intelligence” when referring to AI is still a “pretty unclear, hazy concept.” According to him, the term is “distraction.” Instead, he believes that researchers should focus on the real-life capabilities of AI. Such capabilities include whether an AI agent can talk to humans and plan, schedule, and organize.
He continued by saying that people should step back from the “engineering research-led exciting definition that we’ve used for 20 years to excite the field” and “actually now focus on what these things can do.”
Suleyman’s predictions
The AI leader has made several comments as tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT take the world by storm. His recent comments are just one of many predictions he has made about the societal impact of AI.
In an interview at Davos earlier this week, Suleyman said that AI is a “fundamentally labor-replacing” tool in the long term.
He predicted that everyone in the next five years, additionally, will have AI assistants that will boost productivity and “intimately know your personal information.” This prediction was made last September. He said it will help you reason through your day, prioritize your time, invent, and be much more creative. “
We'll All Have AI Assistants Soon, Google AI Cofounder Says https://t.co/zKMs7L85to pic.twitter.com/jdWET4O7uG
— Trish Carey 🇺🇦 (@TrishCarey) September 6, 2023
However, Suleyman had, in a previous commentary, described his “Turing Test” as an analog for determining how human-like an AI system is, as is whether an AI system could autonomously (and legally) earn $1 million.
Significantly, he spoke at length about the need to constrain artificial intelligence systems before it’s too late. In his book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, published in 2023, Suleyman writes that the next “five years or so are absolutely critical.”
The DeepMind co-founder, in addition, has advocated for United States government intervention in the AI sector. In 2023, he joined OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and executives from Google, Amazon, and other tech companies for a meeting with the U.S. Senate to discuss potential regulatory efforts for AI.
New York Times: OpenAI’s Sam Altman Urges A.I. Regulation in Senate Hearinghttps://t.co/elnjjnY5u1
— nuprizm (@nuprizm) May 16, 2023
Suleyman and other tech leaders signed a voluntary agreement to avoid knowingly creating harmful AI systems. Thus far, no enforceable action has come from the committee meetings.
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