Mustafa Suleyman grew up in social housing in one of the toughest areas of London. His father, a Syrian immigrant, drove a taxi. His mother was a nurse in the National Health Service. When the prestigious Queen Elizabeth School Accepting it when he was 11, the family moved to a safer, greener neighborhood a few miles north.
There he met Demis Hassabis, 20, after befriending his younger brother. Demis was a chess prodigy and video game designer whose parents – one Greek Cypriot and the other Singaporean – ran a toy store in London.
Today, they are two of the most powerful leaders in the tech industry’s race for artificial intelligence. Dr. Hassabis, 47, is the chief executive of Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central artificial intelligence research lab. Mr. Suleyman, 39, was recently named chief executive of Microsoft AI, responsible for overseeing the company’s move into consumer AI products.
Their journey from London to the executive suites of Big Tech is one of the most unusual – and personal – stories in an industry full of colorful personalities and sharp rivalries. In 2010, they were two of three founders of DeepMind, an AI research lab that was supposed to prevent what they are now deeply involved in: a growing race by for-profit companies to create and deploy AI .
Their paths diverged after a clash at DeepMind, acquired by Google for $650 million in 2014. When the race for AI began in late 2022 with the arrival of online chatbot ChatGPT, Google put Dr. Hassabis in charge of his research in AI. Mr. Suleyman took a more difficult path, founding another AI startup, Inflection AI, which struggled to gain traction before Microsoft unexpectedly hired him and most of its employees .
“We have always seen the world differently, but we are convinced that this will be the next big technological transition,” Mr. Suleyman said of his old family friend in an interview. “It’s always a friendly and respectful rivalry.”
Microsoft’s advance in artificial intelligence with its partner OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has shaken Google. The two companies are now fighting to control what many experts see as the next dominant computing platform, a battleground as important as the web browser and the smartphone before it. Dr. Hassabis is credited with creating Google’s AI technology, while Mr. Suleyman is working to bring Microsoft’s AI into the hands of ordinary people.
Although Mr. Suleyman considers their relationship a cordial rivalry, Dr. Hassabis believes that any talk of rivalry is exaggerated. He doesn’t see Mr. Suleyman as a major threat, because the competition in the AI field was already very strong and there were so many formidable companies.
“I don’t think there’s much to say,” he said in an interview with the New York Times. “Most of what he learned about AI came from working with me all those years.”
When the two first met, Mr Suleyman was at primary school and Dr Hassabis had started studying computer science at Cambridge University. While Dr. Hassabis participated in the annual competition University chess match between Cambridge and Oxfordhis younger brother George and Mr Suleyman taught chess to local children at a mathematics school run by the Hassabis family, north London, on Wednesday evenings.
Mr Suleyman went on to study philosophy and theology at Oxford, before dropping out to help launch a mental health helpline for Muslim teenagers and working as a human rights officer. man for Mayor of London. Dr. Hassabis founded a video game company before returning to academia to earn a doctorate in neuroscience. But they shared an interest in high-stakes poker. “We’re both pretty good,” Mr. Suleyman often says.
In 2010, after playing at London’s Victoria Casino, they discussed how they could change the world. Dr. Hassabis dreamed of building the technologies of the future. Mr. Suleyman aimed to change society immediately, by improving health care and bridging the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
“Demis had an aspiration for pure science,” said Reid Hoffman, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Microsoft board member who helped create OpenAI and Inflection AI by Mr. Suleyman. “I convinced Mustafa that this science could be a large-scale attempt to improve things for society – for humanity. »
Dr. Hassabis was completing his postdoctoral work at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, a laboratory at University College London that combined neuroscience (the study of the brain) and AI (the study of brain-like machines). Seeing Mr. Suleyman as a determined personality who could help create a start-up, he invited him to the Gatsby for meetings with a philosophically-minded AI researcher, Shane Legg. In the afternoon, they gathered at a nearby Italian restaurant, cultivating the belief that AI could change the world.
By the end of 2010, after setting up a meeting with Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, the three had secured funding for DeepMind. Its stated mission was to build artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine capable of doing anything the human brain can do.
They were also determined to develop this technology free from the economic pressures that typically drive large companies. These pressures, they believed, could push AI in dangerous directions, upend the job market, or even destroy humanity.
While Dr. Hassabis and Dr. Legg (who still works at DeepMind) were researching intelligent machines, Mr. Suleyman’s task was to create products and generate revenue. He and his team explored an AI video game, an AI fashion app and even whether AI could help a company, Hampton Creek, make vegan mayonnaise, a former colleague said.
Dr. Hassabis told employees that DeepMind would remain independent. But as its research progressed and tech giants like Facebook came in with millions of dollars to poach its researchers, its founders felt they had no choice but to sell out to Google. DeepMind continued to operate as a largely independent research lab, but it was funded by Google and responded to its requests.
For years, DeepMind employees murmured about Mr. Suleyman’s aggressive management style. It came to a head in early 2019 when several employees filed formal complaints accusing Mr. Suleyman of verbally harassing and bullying them, six people said. Former employees said he yelled at them in the open office and berated them for poor work in lengthy text messages.
Mr. Suleyman later said of his time at DeepMind: “I really screwed up. “I remain truly sorry for the impact this has had on people and the hurt they have felt.”
He was placed on leave in August 2019, with DeepMind saying he needed a break after 10 turbulent years. Several people told Dr. Hassabis that the punishment should go further, said two people with knowledge of the conversations.
A few months later, Mr. Suleyman found a job at Google’s headquarters in California. Privately, Mr. Suleyman felt that Dr. Hassabis had stabbed him in the back, said a person with knowledge of their relationship.
Mr. Suleyman’s new job at Google had a big title — vice president of product management and AI policy — but he was not authorized to manage employees, two people said. He didn’t like the role, a friend said, and quickly left to start Inflection AI.
When OpenAI released ChatGPT less than a year later, sparking an industry-wide race to create similar technologies, Google responded forcefully. Last April, the company merged its local AI lab with DeepMind and put Dr. Hassabis in charge.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement over news content related to AI systems.)
For some time, Mr. Suleyman remained an independent voice warning against the tech giant and calling for government regulation of AI. opinion article which he wrote with Ian Bremmer, a noted political scientist, argued that big tech companies were becoming as powerful as nation states.
But after raising more than $1.5 billion to create an AI chatbot with virtually no revenue, his company was in trouble. In March, Inflection AI effectively disappeared within Microsoft, with Suleyman named head of a new Microsoft business that will work to inject AI technologies into the company’s consumer services.
Mr. Suleyman, who splits his time between Silicon Valley and London, has officially become a rival to Google DeepMind, opening a new Microsoft office in London to compete for the same talent. Dr. Hassabis expressed frustration to his team because Mr. Suleyman was positioning himself as a prominent AI visionary, a colleague said.
They still text each other occasionally. They might meet up for dinner if they’re in the same city. But Dr. Hassabis said he is not much worried about what Mr. Suleyman or any other rival is up to.
“I don’t really look to others for advice on what we should do,” Dr. Hassabis said.
