DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman is a heavyweight in the AI space. The Oxford dropout worked as a negotiator for the United Nations and the Dutch government early in his career, but then pivoted to AI and founded DeepMind in 2010 alongside Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg. The machine learning lab grew like a weed under Suleyman, with the backing of Peter Thiel’s Founders’ Fund, before selling to Google parent company Alphabet for £400 million in 2014. Suleyman then took on several roles at DeepMind before stepping down five years later. Now, the veteran AI founder is working on a new company called Inflection AI, which offers personalized AI assistants. And while Suleyman remains an avid supporter of AI, he expressed concerns about the industry’s possible negative effects—in particular on workers. “In the long term…we have to think very hard about how we integrate these tools, because left completely to the market and to their own devices, these are fundamentally labor replacing tools,” Suleyman told CNBC on Wednesday at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland. AI tools do two main things fundamentally differently, the DeepMind co-founder said. First, they make existing operations more efficient, which can lead to huge savings for businesses, but often by replacing the humans who did those jobs. Second, they allow for entirely new operations and processes to be created—a process that can lead to job creation. These two forces will both hit the labor market by storm in coming years, leaving a serious, but unpredictable impact. While Suleyman expects AI to “augment us and make us smarter and more productive for the next couple decades,” over the long term, its impact is still “an open question.”
Full story : DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman warns AI is a ‘fundamentally labor replacing’ tool over the long term.
