No Priors Ep. 16 | With Mustafa Suleyman, Founder of DeepMind and Inflection

(instrumental music plays) Today on No Priors, we're speaking with Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, the pioneering AI lab acquired by Google in 2014 for $650 million, and now co-founder and CEO of Inflection, along with Reid Hoffman and Karine Simonyan. Inflection just launched their first public product, Pi, last week. Mustafa, welcome to No Priors. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

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

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