Mustafa Suleyman on Seemingly Conscious AI and Microsoft's Next Chapter
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There is nothing inside. It is hollow. They don't have a pain network. These models are going to arrive. They're going to be as good as humans at most tasks in the next three to ten years. Adding a new class of rights to these beings would really threaten and kind of undermine our own species. It's really going to change the way that we use computers forever.
Meow! Meow!
Welcome, humans, to The Neuron Explained. I'm Corey Knowles, joined, as always, by Grant Harvey.
Today, we are tackling one of the most interesting ideas in AI right now. What happens when machines start to seem conscious, even if they're not?
Our guest today is at the center of this debate. Mustafa Suleiman is the CEO of Microsoft AI, co-founder of DeepMind and author of The Coming Wave. His recent essay, Seemingly Conscious AI is Coming, raises urgent questions about the risks of building systems that can mimic the texture of consciousness and pull on our empathy without ever actually being alive. Mustafa, welcome to The Neuron. It's a pleasure to meet you, sir.
Thanks, Corey. Thanks, Grant. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, yeah. So in your essay, you argued that AI will actually mimic consciousness in ways that trigger human empathy, even though there is no inner experience. Could you elaborate on what you think the risk of that is and why we should worry about it?
Yeah, I mean, maybe sort of let's start by talking about what these language models are doing, because I think it's important for everybody to try to grasp a pretty simple intuition, which is that The models are generating text by predicting the likelihood of the next word given the previous words in a sentence, the previous words in a prompt, and the previous words that were learned from the statistical structure of the training data that it was trained on. And it is using that very simple likelihood of next word prediction function to simulate what it's like to have great conversation or to answer complex questions. And it is just an insanely difficult to grasp intuition. that that simple function could produce complexity and expertise and emotional support and all of the other skills and attributes that you see in these chatbots today.
So it's first worth just taking a moment to ground on how wild that is. it really is it is crazy I mean sometimes I have to I say it to remind myself as much as anybody else but then the second thing which is even more crazy is that there is nothing inside it is hollow Um, there is no pain network. There is no emotional system. There is no fight or flight reaction system. There is no inner will or drive or desire. Um, and it's difficult for us to grasp that because the only conscious beings that we understand are motivated by a pain network, uh, animals and, you know, other kinds of things included. And so naturally, we would expect that something that has the hallmarks of intelligence also has the underlying, you know, sort of synthetic physiology that we do.
But it doesn't. So it's an illusion. It's a trick. And that is just very important to remember as we try to make sense of these things and relate to them. Because if you forget that, it can be very, very easy to get caught up in the narrative or the illusion, or as some have said, the psychosis of believing that these things are actually real when they're not.
Totally. And I mean, we just saw this paper that came out yesterday from OpenAI that said 700 million people, I think weekly users are using it. And 73% of those people are using it as a life coach or using it for advice about their life. So when you put that in the context of what you just said, it kind of makes you go, whoa, and take a step back.
Yeah. Before I joined Microsoft 18 months ago, I started a company with my friend Reid Hoffman called Inflection AI. We made an AI called PI, which stands for personal intelligence. This is about three or four years ago now. And it was the first AI to be really good at smooth, natural conversation, had a good emotional intelligence, and it was designed to be kind and supportive.
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