Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects the workers of the future to develop close relationships with artificial intelligence agents, to the point of symbiosis.
“I do think your day-to-day workflow just isn’t going to look like this in 10 or 15 years time,” Suleyman said on a recent episode of the “Big Technology” Podcast.
“It’s going to be much more about you managing your AI agent, you asking it to go do things, checking in on its quality, getting feedback, and getting into this symbiotic relationship where you iterate with it,” he said.
Suleyman, the cofounder of Google DeepMind, believes that people are too tied up in the “day-to-day” of AI and failing to reckon with its possible long-term impacts.
“After all, it is intelligence that has produced everything that is of value in our human civilization,” Suleyman said. “Everything around us is a product of smart human beings getting together, organizing, creating, inventing, and producing everything that you see in your line of sight at this very moment.”
Artificial intelligence, shrouded in its fair share of hype, hasn’t yet delivered on the vision often painted by tech leaders — such as breakthroughs in medicine, like treatments for deadly diseases, or solutions to the climate crisis.
But the technology has certainly begun to alter the world we live in. In some cases, applications of the technology have drawn concerns — such as AI’s use in warfare or companies leaning on AI agents over human workers. Demis Hassabis, who co-founded Google DeepMind with Suleyman, has gone so far as to say he worries about ending up like Robert Oppenheimer.
And there’s no going back now — Suleyman, who’s particularly optimistic about AI’s future effects, only expects the pace of innovation to increase.
“And we’re now about to make that very same technique, those set of capabilities, really cheap — if not, like, zero marginal cost,” he said.
In order for younger generations to best prepare themselves to inherit a changed world, Suleyman suggests they familiarize themselves with the technology.
“It’s a little bit like saying, ‘What should young people do when they get access to the internet for the first time?'” he said. “Like, part of it is sort of obvious, where it’s like — use it, experiment, try stuff out, do crazy things, make mistakes, get it wrong.”
It’s technology’s users, Suleyman added, rather than its creators, that ultimately help determine the direction of its future development by identifying how it’s best used.
“As we’ve seen over and over in the history of technology, the things that people choose to do with their phones, with internet, with their laptops, with the tools that they have are always like mind-blowing,” Suleyman said. “They’re always way more inventive and surprising than anything you could possibly think of ahead of time.”
“I think the same applies to a 15-year-old who’s in high school, thinking about what they do next in college or whatever, or whether or not they go to college,” he added.
In order to sort through the noise, Suleyman said, anyone curious should experiment with the models themselves.
“I think the answer is, play with these things,” he said. “Try them out, keep an open mind. Try everything that you possibly can with these models, and then you’ll start to see their weaknesses as well, by the way, and you’ll start to chip away at the hype.”