Mustafa Suleyman

This AI moment is going to deliver the greatest boost to productivity in the history of our species in the next couple of decades.

We're just about to embark on a completely new phase of the digital journey.

Computers are now learning to speak our language.

It will have complete screen understanding of everything that you're doing in your browser or on your desktop or on your phone.

You just get to keep digging in a completely personalized way.

That is going to be the greatest leveling up.

There's still more work to do.

Do not rely on these things just yet.

I think that we are more prepared than the scaremongers make us think.

That does not mean everything is going to be dandy.

It is great to be here.

Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, it's a great question.

I mean, I think that to be rational, you have to be both.

And if you just sit on one side or the other, you're probably missing an important part of the truth.

because I think wisdom in the 21st century is being able to hold multiple confusing or contradictory ideas in working memory at the same time and navigate a path through those things, which doesn't leave you sort of characterizing those who disagree with you or somehow like see things slightly differently in a negative or sort of unconstructive way.

And so it is true

that this AI moment is going to deliver the greatest boost to productivity in the history of our species in the next couple of decades.

That to me is unquestionable.

I don't think that makes me an optimist.

I think that makes me a good predictor of the underlying trends.

At the same time, it is also going to create the most change in a disruptive, positive and negative version of disruptive, way we've ever seen.

That is going to be incredibly destabilizing to the way that we currently understand the world to be, the way that we work, the way our politics operates, fundamentally what it even means to be human.

So we're about to go through a revolution.

And I think that, you know, in that world, I'm both optimistic and there are parts of me that do feel pessimistic.

Yeah, so in the past, the goal has been to invent things and have science make our lives calmer and happier and healthier.

And the race has been, how do we unlock these capabilities as fast as possible?

We want to create and produce and invent and solve challenges.

And that's what we did with steam and oil and electricity and wind and food systems.

And we've seen this explosion of creativity, certainly in the last couple centuries, but that's also been the history of our species, right?

So the goal there has been proliferate, spread it as far and wide as possible so that everyone can enjoy the benefits immediately.

Now, the thing that I've speculated about, which is the containment hypothesis,

is that if we do that this time with AI technologies in a completely unfiltered way, then that has the potential to empower everybody to have a massive impact on everybody else in real time.

So we aren't just talking about spreading information and knowledge, that's one part of it, but increasingly your AI agents or your co-pilots will be able to actually do things in the real world and in the digital world.

And the cost of building one of those things is going to be zero marginal cost.

So everyone's going to have access to them in 20 years, maybe even much earlier.

And that's going to completely change how we get things done, how we interact with one another, and potentially cause a huge amount of chaos.

And so a little bit of friction in the system could be our friend here.

And that's really all that I'm positing in the containment hypothesis.

Containing things so that we can collectively as a society think carefully about the potential future consequences and the third order effects, that seems like a rational thing to do at this point.

Yeah, good question.

I mean, there are lots of potential ways that this technology gets misused.

And in some respects, this concentrates power.

It makes it easier for a small group of people to see what is happening in an entire ecosystem, i.e.

understand the

faces and the images and the patterns of massive crowds of people walking around in our societies.

And that certainly can be used for a lot of good, right?

I mean, we want to have a police force that is capable of instilling order and structure and so on.

On the flip side, that also makes it easier for authoritarians

despots of any kind to identify minority groups that they want to get rid of right and it'll just be much easier to find the needle in the haystack um and again that has like amazing benefits because you can catch the bad guy but it also is potentially scary and so each one of these steps forward has that balancing act between the harms and the benefits

Well, one way of thinking about it is that intelligence is the thing that has made us productive and successful as a species.

It's not just our muscle or our brawn, it's actually our minds.

And our ability to make predictions

in complex environments to solve hard problems, this is really the essence of what makes us special and creative.

We learn to use tools and we invent things.

So that intelligence, that technique of being able to predict what's going to happen next,

that is actually something that we're increasingly learning to automate and, you know, essentially turn into an intelligence system that can be used by everybody.

So what does that mean?

That means, okay, well, we now have this very thing that made us smart and productive and created civilization.

That very concept, intelligence, is going to be cheap and abundant.

Hmm.

Just like energy, frankly oil, has turbocharged the creation of our species, and we now have 7 billion people on the planet, largely as a result of the proliferation of oil, the next wave is that everybody is going to get access to personalized, real-time knowledge, and a companion, an aid, a coach,

a guide, a co-pilot that is going to help you get things done in practice.

It will help you create and invent and solve problems and get things done.

And so that is a massive force amplifier.

So for everybody who wants to solve world hunger or invent new energy systems or solve the battery challenge so that we can really unlock the power of renewables,

We now are going to have a super intelligent aid at your fingertips that's going to help you work through those problems.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're totally right.

And in many ways, the iPhone's impact was just as hard for people to predict.

Like if you said to people in 1985, like what would the internet enable?

Very few people would have predicted mobile phones

with real-time communication, video streaming, a camera and a microphone in your pocket, right?

On the table, almost in every room.

That would have sounded terribly dystopian and scary.

And yet, because of the friction, because it's taken us a couple decades to really figure it out and get it working in practice,

We've created boundaries around these things, right?

We've got security.

We have encryption.

There are privacy standards.

There are real regulators that make meaningful interventions.

And there's public pressure, and there's a reaction, and it steadies the kind of arrival of these technologies in a really healthy and productive way.

And it's kind of mind-blowing.

You're right.

Who would have thought what the iPhone would have done?

Thanks for the question.

It's...

Human rights is core to what I believe to be the solution for a peaceful and stable society.

I think your success and my success is probably largely a function of the privilege that we have to live in a society not at war, have access to a great education system, be able to get access to healthcare,

and really just get the chance to be who we want to be instead of growing up in societies that are maybe in the middle of a refugee camp, going through war, in the middle of complete chaos, families that get moved on month after month or year after year and essentially end up being refugees.

And I think that more than anything, we have to have

so much more empathy and kindness for people who have been through that struggle.

There tends to be a sort of, you know, a demonizing of refugees or migrants as though they're like coming to steal something from our stable worlds.

But in fact, they're actually fleeing insane hardship.

So we have to be way more compassionate and forgiving and kind to those kinds of people.

And remember that those people are just like us.

Like our societies could fall apart in the US, in the UK, in Europe, just as their societies happen to be falling apart at this moment in time.

And we have to extend a hand of friendship and love.

And the human rights framework taught me that.

Because I grew up as a pretty strict Muslim.

And I realized sort of in my late teens and early 20s that it was too narrow a kind of worldview.

Prioritized being Muslim over being human.

And it didn't make sense to me that there wasn't gender equality.

It didn't make sense to me that people who chose to get with a member of the same sex suddenly got demonized and they were like...

evil somehow that none of that made sense to me.

Whereas a human rights framework respects everybody as equals.

And I just can't see how that isn't the right way to live.

So yeah, I became an atheist and secular and, you know, a big believer in these kinds of rights frameworks for everyone.

Well, think about AI as a force amplifier.

So the question is, which force is it amplifying and which...

frame is it placing on the amplification?

So what set of values, what ideas is it putting out into the world?

What are its boundaries?

What does it not do?

And so technology is fundamentally an ethical question.

It is clearly about how we reframe our culture and our ideas and our entertainment, our music, our knowledge in the world, right?

So it was very obvious to me from the very beginning that we started DeepMind that we were going to have

a huge moral responsibility to think about what it's going to be like to bring these agents, these co-pilots into the world.

What would their values be?

What would they not do?

What are their limitations?

And so that always was a big motivator for me and was a big part of the kind of structure that led to our acquisition by Google and subsequent efforts over my time at Google and since then have always been very focused on that question.

Yeah, great question.

I mean, this is a term that gets bandied around quite a lot in kind of nerd niche circles.

And it's sort of broken out a little bit now.

But I mean, basically...

The idea of a general purpose intelligence is that it's capable of learning in any environment, and over time it will end up becoming a super intelligence.

It will get better by learning from itself and learning from any environment that you put it in, so much so that it kind of exceeds human performance at any knowledge or action task.

So it could play any game, control any physical infrastructure, learn about any academic discipline.

It's gonna be a really, really powerful system in the future, but I do think that's a long, long way away.

Before we get there, there are just gonna be regular AI systems or AI companions

that can talk to you in the same language that you or I talk to one another.

I'm sure lots of people have played with various chatbots, like ChatGPT and Copilot.

And you can see it's getting pretty good.

It's still a little awkward, but it's pretty knowledgeable.

We've been reducing the hallucinations quite a lot.

Lately, we've added the real-time access to information so it can check up on the news and it'll know the weather and it'll kind of have a temporal awareness.

And those systems, I think, are going to be around for a pretty long time before we have to worry about a big AGI.

But, you know, that is probably coming.

Yeah, I mean, good question.

So not quite.

Like, I think of a hallucination as the model inventing something new, right?

And so sometimes you want it to be creative.

Like, you're actually looking for it to...

find the connection between a zebra and a lemon and a New York taxi, right?

And if you ask it that question, it's going to come up with some creative, poetic connection that links those three things.

But then sometimes you just want it to be super to the point.

and not wander off and talk all kinds of creative poetic nonsense.

You just wanted to give you the facts.

So that's a spectrum.

And what we're trying to do is figure out from a query, like given the thing that you're asking the model, should we put it into a more creative mode or a more like precise and specific mode that's more likely to be accurate?

And that's kind of the hallucination challenge.

Well, narrow AI is the kind of conversational companions that I was describing.

Like, it's limited.

It doesn't improve on its own.

So, you know, you sort of train it within some boundaries, and then it gets good at a specific number of tasks.

Like, it's good at great conversation.

Maybe it can do document understanding.

Maybe it can even generate a little bit of code, but we know what its capabilities are to some extent.

That's a narrow version of AI when we use it for a specific purpose.

A more general AI is going to be one where it has things like recursive self-improvement.

It could edit its own code in order to get better, or it could self-improve, or it would have autonomy.

It could act independently of your direct, you know, command essentially, or you give it a very general command, you know, and it goes off and does all sort of sub actions that are super complicated.

Like, you know, maybe even invent a new product and create a website for it and then set up a drop ship for it and then, you know, go and market it and, you know,

grab all the, you know, take all the income and then do the accounts and so on.

I mean, I think that's kind of plausible in say three to five years before 2030.

I think we'll definitely have that and might well be much, much sooner.

Could well be like a lot sooner.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, we are going to have to contend with a new type of software, right?

Historically, software has been, you know, input in, input out.

You type something on Airbnb and it gives you a search result page.

Or, you know, you play a piece of music and it, you know, on Spotify and that, you know, comes out as intended.

And software so far has been about utility.

It's been functional.

The goal is for it to do the same thing over and over again in a very predictable way.

And it's been really useful, right?

We've created trillions of dollars of business value out of it and unbelievable social human connection and knowledge and all the rest of it.

It's been incredible, actually.

But we're just about to embark on a completely new phase of the digital journey where computers are now learning to speak our language, right?

You don't have to learn the language of a computer to interact with it anymore.

I mean, you can, it's still important to be a programmer, but it can actually understand your language.

It can understand the audio that you give it when you do a voice input, the intonation, the inflection, the volume, the pace, the pauses, right?

It will increasingly be able to see what you see

So not only will you take a picture and it will recognize what's in the picture, it will have complete screen understanding of everything that you're doing in your browser or on your desktop or on your phone.

Frame by frame, you're browsing Instagram, it's seeing everything that you're seeing in real time, talking to you about the content of what you're interacting with on Instagram, on TikTok, you know, when you're reading the news, whatever you're doing.

So that's a profound shift.

Yeah.

That's not a tool anymore.

That is really starting to capture something meaningful about what it means to be human, because it's using the same language that we use to understand one another.

All those subtle cues that take place in social bonding of human relationships, suddenly it's going to be present in that dynamic.

It's a really big deal.

I think even though

We've had a couple of years of large language models being out there and people get to play with it in the open source.

I still don't think people are quite grasping how big a deal this shift is about to be.

You know, I think there are many amazing things about religion.

Religion was a way that people made up stories, this is in my opinion, in order to make sense of a complex world that was confusing.

And then science came along and showed that actually, we really can understand the world through empirical observation and a falsifiable process of coming up with a hypothesis, running some experiments, observing those results, subjecting them to peer review, and then iterating on the corpus of human knowledge.

And that's how we've produced known facts

that are very reliable because they keep getting tested over and over again.

When something fundamental happens, we change our entire paradigm.

I think that it's unclear to me what role religion plays anymore in understanding the

physical world, or even increasingly understanding the kind of social world.

I think that, you know, if you look at the contributions in the last, say, century or even couple centuries from great poets and philosophers and musicians, storytellers, creators, inventors,

most of them have nothing to do with religion, and yet they've taught us most about ourselves and our societies.

If you really want to understand who we are as a people, as humans, how our societies function, you don't turn to religion anymore, unfortunately.

Some people will obviously disagree with that and full respect to them for their opinion, but that's kind of where I land on it these days.

Well, we were at a time when I had sort of just left Google.

I'd been working on Lambda, which was Google's conversational search AI that we ended up never launching.

It then got launched as Bard, and then it became Gemini.

And I was sort of frustrated because I was like, these technologies are ready for prime time.

They're...

They're ready for feedback from the real world.

They're not perfect.

They make a lot of mistakes.

But we're technology creators.

We've got to put things out there and see how it lands, iterate quickly, listen to what people have to say.

And it was just frustrating that we just couldn't get things done at Google at that time.

And so I realized...

It has to be done.

It's time to start a company.

Me and Reid Hoffman and my friend Karen Simonian started Inflection, and we created Pi, the personal intelligence.

It was a super friendly, warm, high emotional intelligence conversational companion.

At the time, it was, I think, the most fluent and the most kind of high EQ conversational companion.

It had a bit of personality.

It had a bit of humor.

And, you know, I think that it was an interesting time because we ended up getting decent number of users.

We had like a million DAO, about 6 million monthly active users.

But the main thing I realized is that some people really love these experiences.

I mean, the average session length for Pi was 33 minutes.

4.5 times a week.

So that ranks it right up there.

I was under TikTok, but right up there.

And there's not many experiences like that.

And so I think it gave me a real glimmer into what's coming and how different the quality of the interaction is going to be if you really get the aesthetic and the UI and the tone of the personality right.

Yeah.

I mean, so far, you're right.

ChatGPT is really a kind of work and productivity AI.

And it's great.

It gives you access to knowledge and helps you rewrite things and so on.

But in a way, it sort of addresses a small part of our, or one important part of our human needs, right?

I mean, the other part of our needs are to make sense of the world, to receive emotional support,

to kind of have understanding of our social complexity, right?

I mean, we want to come at the end of the day and vent, right?

A big part of what I think people are doing on social media is posting stuff so that they can be heard.

People want to feel like someone else is paying attention to them, that they want to feel like they're understood and that they're saying something that's meaningful.

Or maybe they just want to work through something.

So in the new co-pilot that we've launched just a few weeks ago at Microsoft AI, we focused both on the IQ.

So it's exceptionally accurate data.

minimizes those hallucinations we were talking about, has access to real-time information, really fast and fluent.

But we've also focused on the EQ because we want it to be a kind companion.

We want it to be your hype man.

We want it to back you up, right?

We want it to be in your corner, on your team, looking out for you there when you need it.

I think people underrate how important that kind of social privilege is.

You know, that is one of the things that gives middle class kids a huge leg up to always have a parent there, to always have a stable family with a sibling or, you know, even a best friend available to you whenever you need it.

And I think that we're going to just touch on a little bit of those experiences now and make that available via Copilot.

Yeah, I think you're going to say like, hey, Copilot, or whatever you call your personal AI, I'm stuck.

What's the answer to this?

How should I navigate that?

I need to go buy this thing.

Can you take care of it for me?

Will I be available in a week to do this thing?

You're going to basically use it as a way to organize your life and spend less time being distracted by administration and more time

pursuing your curiosities, right?

Especially in the voice mode.

I think you very quickly just forget that this is actually a piece of technology and it feels like you're just having a great conversation with a teacher that is patient, nonjudgmental, doesn't put you down, has infinite time available to you, and will wander off on the path that you choose to take

through some complicated question.

And it doesn't matter how many times you go back and say, can you explain that again?

I didn't quite understand that.

What do you mean?

No problem.

You just get to keep digging in a completely personalized way.

That is going to be the greatest leveling up we have ever seen because it's expensive, you know, socially.

It costs for me to turn around to one of my friends who knows a lot about something and pick up the phone and say, hey, man, can you walk me through this thing?

And obviously my friends will do it, but there's a barrier there, right?

It's not instant.

I'm really asking for something or it's a cost for me to unload on my friend at the end of the day when I'm frustrated and irritated.

And I want to show up to my best friend in the best possible way and like have fun and be bright and energetic.

And I'm still going to have those emotional moments with them.

It's not that they're not going to be there.

It's just that it now lowers the barrier to entry to get access to support and knowledge and information.

And that is what is going to be the level up.

Every new wave of technology leaves us with a cultural shift.

It's not just static.

It's going to have some impact.

And it may be the case that social media has made us feel more lonely and isolated.

And we have to unpack that.

Like, why is that?

What is that people report feeling lonely?

But another way of thinking about it that I think is that people feel judged by social media.

They feel excluded.

They feel not good enough.

Why is that?

Because I think Instagram really dominated in highlighting a certain visual aesthetic.

I need to be big and have muscles, right?

I need to get my fashion on point.

Oh my God, look at how good a cook she is.

She's making incredible food.

Look at how she's taking care and he's taking care of their kids.

You know, like I'm just looking at all these perfect caricatures and it's making me feel insecure.

Yeah.

So I think that's what's at the heart of it.

And what sits beneath that is a UI, a UI that rewards a certain type of attention.

And I think you can create new UIs.

You can create new reward mechanisms, new incentivizations to dampen that spirit and create more kind of breadth, actually.

And actually, I think in a way, TikTok is an evolution of that because you don't get as much of that

On TikTok, it's kind of, you know, a lot of the comments even are like much more healthy.

They're like full of jokes and support and, you know, kind of friendly banter.

Whereas YouTube was just spiteful.

I remember the YouTube comments back in the day seemed really like rough.

And obviously like X, I mean, I don't know who uses X anymore, but like that's turned into a cesspit.

So I just think you have to be conscious and deliberate.

I'm sure that when we put out our new AI experiences, there are going to be some parts of society that get ruffled by it.

And my job and my life's work is to be super attentive to those consequences and respond as fast as possible to trim the edges and reshape it and cast it.

It's like a sculpture, and you have to just be paying full attention and taking responsibility for the real-time consequences of it.

So we launched Copilot about a year ago, very much as an experiment to see how people like to interact with conversational LLMs.

In the work setting, it's pretty incredible to see how Copilot is now embedded in Microsoft 365.

So on Windows, on Word, on Excel,

There's so many tools and features that enable you to just ask your co-pilot whilst you're in the context of your document to summarize something or create a table or to create a schedule or to compare two complex ideas.

And so I think it's had a massive impact there actually.

And it sort of doesn't get talked about so much because it's been so kind of embedded and now it's become like second nature.

It's like part of people's everyday workflow.

Well, the next wave for co-pilots is these sort of flavor of much more personable, much more fluent, much more natural interactions.

So it's fast, it's sleek, it's very elegant in the UI.

We've done a lot of work to pare back the complexity.

I think that people want calming, you know, cleaner interfaces.

I feel like when I look at my computer sometimes, I see like...

colors of every type, shapes, different kinds of information architectures.

And it's just like this blur and I just need like serenity and simplicity.

So we're really designing Copilot to go out and fetch the perfect nuggets of information for you and bring them into your kind of clean feed and really create a UI where you can focus on conversation.

So the answers are designed to be pithy, short,

you know, humorous, the little bit of like, you know, spice, a bit of energy and, you know, it's fun to chat to as well as learn from at the same time.

And so that kind of interactive back and forth was a big part of the motivation for how we designed it.

Yeah, it's really designed to have a bit more of that connection.

You know, it'll ask you questions.

Or if you're in the voice mode, for example, it will actively listen.

So, you know, it will go, you know, it will kind of go, uh-huh.

or no way or right whilst you're speaking to let it to let you know that like it's listening it's paying attention it's keeping the conversation moving um and so just little subtle touches like that um as well as like the intonation in the voice and the energy that it brings those kinds of things are are i think really quite different to what we've seen before

Yeah, there's a lot coming.

I mean, you're going to see a different kind of hardware platform, I think, over time.

You're going to see a lot of different features in terms of personalization.

So I think increasingly people are going to want to give their co-pilots their own name.

And who knows, one day in the future, it might have an avatar or visual representation.

So we're thinking about a lot of different angles.

I think that it's naturally going to evolve to be more of a coworker because you want it to be able to fill in your gaps, right?

You know, you think you have certain strengths and weaknesses.

Some of us are more analytical.

Some of us are more creative.

Some of us are more structured.

You can think of each one of us as this unique kind of, you know, key that fits like a perfect lock with our strengths and weaknesses.

And I think that each co-pilot is going to adapt to the grooves of your unique constellation of skills.

And so if it fits to you, it kind of means like you and your co-pilot are going to be like a pair.

You're going to be like a powerhouse.

I mean, who knows one day you might even go and do job interviews together because it's going to be like you're hiring me and my co-pilot.

We're a pair, you know.

It could well be your co-founder.

I'm expecting anytime soon people to declare that it's like them and their AI starting this new company.

I mean, people said that about the calculator, right?

That it was going to lead to kids cheating in tests and so on and so forth.

And it didn't.

It just made us smarter, enabled us as humans to do more complex computations.

And so I don't see any evidence that it's making us dumber in any way.

I mean, we have overwhelming access to information.

And I think that on one level, that has actually made us all way more tolerant and respectful and kind.

People tend to fixate

on the polarization politically in our society.

But actually, think about it from the other perspective.

20 years ago, take your pick, abortions, religion, sexuality, gender, trans rights, I mean, take your pick.

All of those were decades and decades behind where they are now.

It is amazing how bright and beautiful and colorful our world is now and how respectful and kind we are on the whole.

Now, there are still pockets of fear and hatred and, you know, there's plenty of that, but there's also massive, massive progress.

And I think that progress is a function of us having access to knowledge about one another, living together, growing together, hearing from one another.

And I think that's going to continue.

Yeah, there's still more work to do, right?

I'm painting a rosy picture of the future.

It's going to be a while for these things to actually work perfectly.

So you've always got to double check it.

Do not rely on these things just yet.

At the same time, you would be a fool not to use them because it really is a complete revolution in access to information and support and so on.

The good news is that if you're starting a new business or if you're trying to figure out your next move in life in general, everything is available open source.

You can try any model on any API, you can get access to the source code quite often, and really get a really good understanding of the cutting edge.

You can't get that absolute cutting edge in open source, but you can get very, very close.

And I think that will give anybody a good instinct for how these things can be useful to your business or to your startup or to your next step in life.

Yeah, sure.

So we're actually one of the largest buyers of renewable energy on the planet.

And that's a long time commitment by the company to be net zero by 2026 and carbon negative.

So giving back, taking carbon out of the supply chain by 2030.

So in order to do that, we've also been massively investing in new technologies and new science.

For example, massive investments in battery storage and nuclear fusion projects, in carbon sequestration, so taking carbon out of the atmosphere.

So across the board, we've been making this a priority for quite a long time.

You know, I think that one way of thinking about it is that cars have been contained.

So cars have been around for 80 years, and we have layers and layers and layers of regulations.

seat belts, emissions, you know, windscreen tensile strength, street lighting, disposal of the materials after a car's life is over, driver training.

Now, there's an entire ecosystem of containment built up to prevent, you know, a 13-year-old from driving through a field and, you know, crashing into a cow or whatever.

You know, it's a...

infrastructure for containment that takes time to evolve.

And we've actually done it pretty well.

And cars are now incredibly safe, just like airplanes, just like drones.

You know, drones haven't just suddenly exploded into our world.

They've had containment.

There are rules.

You can't just go fly a drone in Times Square.

You have to get a permit.

You need to get a drone license.

There are certain places that you can't fly them at all, like near airports.

So this isn't actually that complicated.

It's quite likely that we will succeed in putting the boundaries around these things so that they're a net benefit to everybody.

Yeah, that's a tough question.

I mean, there are definitely bad apples and there are definitely people who will misuse it.

And that's kind of the conundrum, I think, is that we have a two-pronged challenge.

One is figuring out how nation states and democracies get into a place where they can regulate the powerful, big companies like me.

They can hold us accountable and they can make the public feel like they're competent and they're on the case.

regulating centralized power.

Then the second is, how do we cope with the fact that everybody's going to have access to this in seconds?

We want them to.

It's not like we don't want people to have access.

We want people to have access in open-source.

I think the important thing to remember is that so far we haven't seen any catastrophic harms arising from open source or in the large-scale models.

All of this is speculation.

Everyone could be totally wrong.

It could be that we're actually not going to progress as fast as we thought.

It could be that we come up with really reliable ways of instilling safety into this code.

certainly could be the case.

And there's no reason for us to start slowing down open source right now.

None at all, right?

It needs to continue because people get enormous benefit out of it.

At the same time, if something were to go wrong, it's just software.

So someone can copy it and repost it and post it again, and it's going to spread super fast.

So I just think it's a new type of challenge that we haven't yet faced yet.

I think people often forget the internet is quite regulated.

So it's not like this is the internet is this kind of free-for-all, chaotic, open domain, right?

There's a whole bunch of things that you can't find on the web, or you have to really work hard to get on the dark web and find pretty ugly stuff.

And it's illegal, and if you get caught doing it, you're in deep trouble and stuff like that.

So it's not like it's just going to be a total free-for-all.

And

In general, I think most people do want to do the right thing.

So this isn't about worrying about your average user.

This is about a tiny number of really bad apples, as you say.

I think that we are more prepared than the scaremongers make us think.

That does not mean everything is going to be dandy.

There's a lot of work to do, and each new technology is new to us.

By definition, it's something we haven't seen before.

When I was writing my book,

I read about this amazing story of the first passenger railway train that took a trip in Liverpool.

This is 1830, so the first time anybody has ever seen a moving carriage, essentially.

It was a single carriage on rails.

The prime minister came down to celebrate.

There were tons of people there, the mayor, and there was the local MP.

They were so excited by what was coming that they actually stood on the tracks and they didn't get out of the way when the train came.

And it killed a bunch of people, including the local MP.

So it was that alien and that strange, just a regular moving carriage that they couldn't figure out that they needed to get out of the way.

So that obviously, I'm sure, never happened again.

But it gives you an indication sometimes of how kind of surprising and strange it can be and how we can be unprepared.

And now, obviously, we're not living in the 1830s.

We have the benefit of...

hundreds of millions of inventions since then.

We understand a lot more about the process of inventing, creating technology, seeing it proliferate.

We understand a lot more even about digital technologies in the last couple of decades.

We see the consequences

in social media.

We see how unencrypted phones cause security chaos.

We see how hackers try all sorts of different tricks of the trade to undermine our security and privacy and so on.

There's an accumulation of knowledge that, on the one hand, should make us feel

you know, optimistic that we are prepared.

On the other hand, we also know that these are unprecedented times and these are very new and fundamentally different experiences.

And so I don't think we should, you know, we shouldn't be complacent.

You know, this is going to be different.

Yeah, I think that work is going to change.

I mean, it's already changing, right?

I mean, we're already remote.

We're on our devices.

You know, I do honestly half of my work on my phone because I travel a lot and I'm like always making phone calls, sending text messages and, you know, using messaging and teams and so on.

So, you know, it is going to be very, very different.

And I think in an AI world, you're going to have your companion with you, remembering your tasks, helping you get things done on time, helping you stay organized and on top of all the chaos.

I think that should make you feel lighter and more prepared, mentally more ready to be creative.

And that's what's going to be required of us because routine work is going to go away.

Like a lot of the kind of drudgery of...

you know, sort of elementary, you know, digital life, it's going to get a lot smoother and a lot easier.

And so that's going to free us up to, you know, be creative as entrepreneurs.

So I think that's some amazing things are going to be invented as a result of that extra time that we're going to have.

I think that work was invented because we had limited resources and we had to organize ourselves in efficient ways to reduce suffering.

So what happens when we don't have as much of that burden, and actually there is

going to be resource available for millions of people.

And the greatest challenge we have is figuring out how to distribute it and how to make sure that everybody gets access.

So I don't think there is something inherent about the human connection and need for purpose with work.

I think many people find their purpose and passion in a gazillion other things that we all do, right?

Many people also find it in work too.

And, you know,

That is going to be a big shift, because if you find passion in that kind of drudgeness work that I described, then now you're going to be there, you know, in 20 years time.

So you have to think hard about that.

But I think it's pretty exciting.

People are going to be able to find many, many new purposes and many, many new things to do with their lives.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think so.

I don't know how long.

I'm not one of these kind of like, you know, live forever type people.

But we're already living longer because we have a much better awareness of, you know, health conditions.

I'm just thinking about how many people died because everyone thought smoking was okay, right?

And how many lives were cut short.

And now so few people smoke, right?

And, you know, people are aware about the consequences of alcohol or unhealthy food or

sitting on the couch, like just that alone, again, access to information, scientific evidence, proving that these things actually do lead to longevity.

That's all table stakes now.

And so for sure, there's this kind of bump that we're going to get in 60 years time when a bunch of people who've grown up

just, you know, since their teens thinking that, you know, living a healthy life is the normal thing to do instead of like how I grew up, which is like cigarettes and alcohol and da, da, da, da, da.

Like, you know, so obviously there's still room for all that kind of stuff, but is a different thing now.

And then on top of that,

Like we're going to have AI tools that help us to really make sense of the literature for us in a personalized way.

We can really see what kind of nutrition we might need given our gut biome.

You know, that whole sort of movement is only just starting to kind of have effect.

And I think it's going to be pretty impactful.

I mean, all the tools are already at our fingertips.

I mean, in some ways, that's kind of like an overwhelming thing, you know, because it's like,

it's just there.

There's like nothing holding you back.

I mean, there's no secret sauce.

Like my team has some, you know, little bits and pieces here and there that might not be available, but you know, most of it, the knowledge, the know-how,

You know, the cloud services, the open source stuff, the YouTube videos, it's all there.

And so it is an electric time.

You know, I'm seeing, someone came up to me at a book signing that I did the other day.

She's 15 years old and she was showing me this unbelievable project that she had been

working on, made a bunch of money, strung together from all available public tools with two of her pals, thinking about dropping out of school.

It blew my mind.

And I think that

is just like there if you're hungry.

And, you know, if you're ready to take risks, this is the thing I say to people, just take risks when you're young.

Take risks.

I took a lot of risks, you know.

Drop out, change your degree, switch your subject, give up work, maximize your side hustle, partner with a friend that you're not sure about partnering with, go ask a question.

You know, just like people want to help.

Just ping them an email.

doorstep them.

People don't doorstep each other anymore.

Back in the day, people would wait outside.

It means after a show or outside a theater.

Wait for somebody.

That used to be a big thing.

That used to be how people did networking.

They would go to an event because they knew that someone was going to be there and then try to build the connection.

Physical connection's huge.

Find that moment to shake someone's hand, show a quick demo, drop them a note.

It's hustle.

It's just hustle culture.

That's what you've got to be on if you really want to do it.

And everyone's in the game.

So what an amazing time to be creative.

Take that risk.

Yeah, because I did that as well, right?

I mean, I dropped out of my degree.

Like I switched up my careers a bunch of times, you know, like I wasn't afraid to ask people for help.

And it was really the people that...

The reason that I've been successful is because a few people gave me unbelievable opportunities at the right moment when I was really young.

Help me get into a great school.

I ended up going to Oxford.

Help me get a great early job.

Help me when I started my telephone counseling service when I was 19.

It's really other people that end up lifting you up, and you have to form those relationships

give so much thanks and praise to those who do do that, and then keep giving it to other people too.

I mean, you know, one thing is I reply to a lot of my LinkedIns.

I won't say I reply to all of them because that would be a lie, but I do reply to a lot.

I certainly reply to all my emails,

And people cold email me all the time.

And I might not be able to help them, but I'll reply.

I'll point them in the right direction or something because that's really what matters.

And when you see someone who's taken that extra step to try and hustle it, I really rate that.

And I think it's the way forward.

Yeah.

And I just got super lucky as well.

Like I've obviously done some things right.

But I mean, luck is a huge part of it.

And, you know, you kind of make your own luck by asking people for favors and help and advice and feedback.

Like I've just learned everything along the way by assuming that I know nothing.

But that's the key thing is that I'm not embarrassed to look.

Even to this day in front of my team, I'll often ask the stupid question.

And quite often I end up looking like an idiot.

Like probably one out of five times, maybe even one out of four.

Like I will say something and I'm like, oh, that was a clanger.

Like, oops.

But then, you know, a bunch of other times it will be like, oh, that was the thing that everyone was thinking.

And then my team seeing me trip

and just look like a doofus, that encourages them to then go and ask the stupid question.

And then we're all just less judgmental.

There's none of this professional nonsense, like you have to be all formal and straight.

You just break down those barriers, be human to one another, collaborate deeply, like set aside shame.

Shame is one of the most useless emotions.

I'm so sorry that we evolved to carry this thing.

Frankly, I think it comes from religion, but that's another story.

But I just think, why are we carrying around this?

baggage of shame.

There's no need to be ashamed.

Just recognize when you tripped up, make a correction, take the next step.

Yeah, so my style tends to be very open and collaborative.

I like to hear lots and lots of disagreeing voices.

Strong opinions are healthy, provided they're grounded in wisdom and humility.

They need to be evidenced, right?

They need to reference some sort of historical example or some data or some empirical case.

or they need to be explicitly named as a guesstimate.

I don't mind that either.

Like one thing I often say to people is, deliver your message with metadata.

Such a basic thing.

Say to the person,

I'm really sure about this because I've looked up this fact.

I'm really not sure about this.

Or I'm looking for feedback on this one.

Or this is just an FYI.

So letting each other know what the status of our exchange is helps to kind of...

often I see conflicts arise from a mis-expectation about what two people are expecting in an exchange.

So that's one thing, it's like clear communication, there's evidence-based, there's a lot of humility, very collaborative and open, but I'm also very decisive.

Like fundamentally, my job is to sift through all the complexity and make a call because there's really nothing worse than not having clarity for the team.

Even if we end up going in the wrong direction, that's totally fine because we'll calibrate.

We have a process for feedback and iteration and retrospective, and that will really, really help.

One thing that I've struggled with is

is um in larger organizations naturally because there's like tens or hundreds of thousands of people there's different people with different motivations in a startup you know that everyone is do or die you know and and maybe there's one or two that aren't and they get rotated out but they're like there for it and in a bigger organization it's not always true like some people are just

you know, kind of happy in the rhythm that they're in.

And so one of my learnings is, you know, to kind of learn to energize those people and find a, you know, sort of practical flow to kind of get them in and get them being useful.

Oh, man, I don't think about legacy.

I think about the future.

But you're totally right.

I mean, let me think about that.

That's a hard one for me.

I mean, I hope that like...

I'm able to live my values authentically and let people know what I'm trying to do, give people an opportunity to disagree with it, but fundamentally move at pace to experiment with this new approach of AI companions and emotionally intelligent AIs.

I really want to try and help steward this new moment with kindness and compassion.

That's what means a lot to me.

I think the most important thing has got to be to be critical of yourself.

You know, retrospectives are key.

Ask for feedback from your friends, your family, and especially ask for feedback from people who you think, you know, are going to give you something a little bit barbed.

You don't have to take it, but just at least be aware of the landscape and get in the habit of not having a thin skin.

That will make you tougher and stronger for everything that you've got to encounter next.

Learning and humility.

Like I have made so many mistakes and I still make mistakes all the time.

And I've upset people.

I've hurt people.

I've pissed people off.

And I don't like doing it.

I hate it.

It grinds at me.

But it's my fuel because that's the signal I need to get better every day.

And I know that the one thing I can do is I have this process of getting better step by step.

And I've been doing it since day and I just, I love it.

That's what I live for, learning.

Well, I'm on LinkedIn.

I'm not on Instagram or TikTok, unfortunately.

But obviously, I'm also a huge believer in our Copilot AI.

So you can download that in iOS, Android or copilot.microsoft.com.

Nice.

This has been awesome.

Thanks so much.