Mustafa Suleiman grew up in subsidized housing in one of London's most dangerous areas. His father was a Syrian immigrant who drove a taxi. His mother was a nurse in the National Health Service. When, at the age of 11, he was accepted into the prestigious Queen's Elizabeth School, the family moved a few miles north to a safer, greener area.
There he met 20-year-old Demis Hassabis, after befriending his younger brother. Demis was a talented chess player and video game designer whose parents, one Greek Cypriot and one Singaporean, ran a toy store in London.
Today, these two are among the most powerful executives in the race to build artificial intelligence in the technology industry. Dr. Hassabis, 47, is the chief executive officer of Google DeepMind, the tech giant's central artificial intelligence laboratory. Suleiman, 39, was recently named CEO of Microsoft AI, with responsibility for overseeing the company's AI consumer products efforts.
Their journey from London to the boardrooms of major tech companies is one of the most unusual and personal stories in an industry filled with colorful personalities and bitter rivalries. In 2010, they were two of the three founders of DeepMind. DeepMind is a seminal AI research institute that was supposed to prevent the very thing they are currently deeply involved in: increasing competition from profit-driven companies to build and deploy AI.
The two sides parted ways after a clash over DeepMind, which Google acquired for $650 million in 2014. When the AI race began at the end of 2022 with the introduction of the online chatbot ChatGPT, Google put Dr. Hassabis in charge of its AI research. Mr. Suleiman chose a more difficult path. He founded another AI startup, Inflection AI, that struggled to gain traction until Microsoft unexpectedly hired him and most of its employees.
“We have always seen the world differently, but we have been united in believing that this is the next big shift in technology,” Suleiman said of his old family friend in an interview. “It's always been a friendly and respectful rivalry.”
Microsoft's push into artificial intelligence with its partner OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has upset Google. The two companies are currently fighting for control of what many experts see as the next dominant computing platform, a battleground as important as web browsers and smartphones before them. Dr. Hassabis is driving the development of Google's AI technology, and Mr. Suleiman is working to get Microsoft's AI into the hands of ordinary people.
Although Mr. Suleiman considers their relationship to be a genuine rivalry, Dr. Hassabis believes talk of a rivalry is exaggerated. He doesn't see Suleiman as a major threat, as competition in the AI field is already very strong, with many powerful companies participating.
“I don't think there's much to say,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “Most of what he has learned about his AI comes from working with me over the years.”
When the two first met, Mr. Suleiman was a primary school student and Dr. Hassabis had just started a degree in computer science at Cambridge University. While Dr Hassabis competes in the annual Cambridge-Oxford representative chess match, his younger brother George and Mr Suleiman teach chess to local children at the Hassabis family's Wednesday Night Mathematics School in north London. was teaching.
Mr Suleiman went on to study philosophy and theology at Oxford University, before dropping out to help set up a mental health helpline for Muslim teenagers and working as a human rights officer for the Mayor of London. Dr. Hassabis founded a video game company before returning to academia to earn a PhD in neuroscience. However, they shared an interest in high stakes poker. “We are both very good at it,” Suleiman likes to say.
In 2010, after watching a game at London's Victoria Casino, they discussed how they could change the world. Dr. Hassabis dreamed of building the technology of the future. Suleiman aimed to immediately change society by improving health care and closing the gap between the haves and have-nots.
“Mr. Demis had ambitions for pure science moonshots,” said Reid Hoffman, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Microsoft board member who helped found both OpenAI and Mr. Suleiman's Inflection AI. talk. “He convinced Mustafa that this science could be a higher goal for making things better for society and for humanity.”
Dr. Hassabis was completing his postdoctoral work at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, a laboratory at University College London that combines neuroscience (the study of the brain) and AI (the study of brain-like machines). Seeing Suleiman as a passionate person who could help build the startup, he invited him to Gatsby to meet with Shane Legg, a philosophically-minded AI researcher. In the afternoon, they gathered at a nearby Italian restaurant to develop their belief that AI could change the world.
By the end of 2010, after organizing a meeting with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the three had secured funding for DeepMind. Its stated mission was to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.
They were also determined to build technology free from the economic pressures that typically drive large corporations. These pressures, they believed, were pushing AI in a dangerous direction that could upend the job market and even wipe out humanity.
While Dr. Hassabis and Dr. Legg (who are still at DeepMind) were pursuing intelligent machines, Mr. Suleiman's job was to build the products and make money from them. According to his former colleagues, he and his team considered whether AI could help with AI video games, AI fashion apps, and even Hampton Creek's production of vegan mayonnaise.
Dr. Hassabis told employees that DeepMind will remain independent. But as research progressed and tech giants like Facebook swooped in with millions of dollars to poach researchers, the founders felt they had no choice but to sell out to Google. DeepMind continued to operate as a largely independent research organization, but received funding and answers from Google.
DeepMind employees have been whispering about Mr. Suleiman's aggressive management style for years. The situation came to light in early 2019 when several employees filed formal complaints accusing Suleiman of verbal harassment and bullying, according to six people involved. Former employees said he yelled at them in open offices and accused them of poor work performance in lengthy text message threads.
Suleiman later said of his time at DeepMind: I still feel very sorry for the impact it had on people and the hurt they felt there. ”
He was placed on leave in August 2019, saying DeepMind needed a break after a busy decade. According to two people with knowledge of the conversations, multiple people told Dr. Hassabis that the punishment should be even tougher.
A few months later, Mr. Suleiman moved to Google's California headquarters. A person familiar with the relationship said that Suleiman secretly felt like Dr. Hassabis had stabbed him in the back.
Mr. Suleiman's new role at Google had the broad title of vice president of AI product management and AI policy, but did not allow him to manage employees, two people familiar with the matter said. According to his friends, he hated the role and soon left to start Inflection AI.
Less than a year later, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, sparking an industry-wide race to develop similar technology, Google responded strongly. Last April, the company merged its AI lab with DeepMind, putting Dr. Hassabis in charge.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
For some time, Mr. Suleiman has been an independent voice warning against big tech companies and calling for government regulation of AI.In an opinion piece co-authored with renowned political scientist Ian Bremer, he argued that big tech companies are becoming nation-states. He argued that it is becoming just as powerful.
But despite raising more than $1.5 billion to build an AI chatbot, his company was struggling with little revenue. Inflection AI effectively disappeared from Microsoft in March, and Mr. Suleiman was put in charge of a new Microsoft business that would bring AI technology across the company's consumer services.
Suleiman, 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. According to his colleagues, Dr. Hassabis expressed to staff his dissatisfaction with Mr. Suleiman's positioning of himself as a prominent AI visionary.
They still text each other from time to time. If they are in the same city, they might meet for dinner. But Dr. Hassabis said he was not too worried about what Mr. Suleiman or his other rivals were planning to do.
“I don't really look to others for what we should do,” Dr. Hassabis says.
