A New Digital Species
Key insights of today’s newsletter:
In his new role as the CEO of the Microsoft AI devision, Mustafa Suleyman gave TED talk in Vancouver, Canada.
In his talk, Suleyman suggested we need new words and metaphors to think more effectively about AI.
He also brought a metaphor of his own: AI as a new digital species, making the case that AI is different from all technologies that came before.
↓ Go deeper (6 min read)
I like Mustafa Suleyman. I think he’s smart. He’s an extremely talented entrepreneur and gifted speaker. He’s good with words. Too good even, perhaps. But let’s not run ahead of ourselves.
Suleyman was CEO and co-founder of DeepMind until it was acquired by Google, after which he founded another company that you may have heard of, Inflection AI. In March of this year, Microsoft announced Suleyman would come on board to lead their consumer AI division, leaving Inflection AI behind. The news took many, including the team at Inflection, by surprise.
In his new role as the CEO of the Microsoft AI devision, he addressed the TED audience in Vancouver, CA, less than two weeks ago. In his talk, titled: What is an AI anyway?, Suleyman laid out his vision for the future of AI.
I’d like to highlight some of the most interesting bits and pieces for your entertainment and mine.
2:03 What is an AI anyway?
One morning over breakfast, my six-year-old nephew Caspian was playing with Pi, the AI I created at my last company, Inflection. With a mouthful of scrambled eggs, he looked at me plain in the face and said, “But Mustafa, what is an AI anyway?”
Let me start by saying that Suleyman is a great storyteller. He has an exceptional ability to take people on a journey, presenting a clear narrative, with flawless delivery. I think it’s one of the main reasons why he’s so effective as an entrepreneur and leader.
4:00 Inflection point
It is clear that we are at an inflection point in the history of humanity. On our current trajectory, we're headed towards the emergence of something that we are all struggling to describe, and yet we cannot control what we don't understand. And so the metaphors, the mental models, the names, these all matter if we’re to get the most out of AI whilst limiting its potential downsides.
I agree with Suleyman here. Language is everything. Language shapes our ability to make sense of the world and whenever something new comes along, we look for words. We find refuge in analogies, but even analogies can only do so much in terms of explaining what a thing is and isn’t. We try anyway.
4:54 A new digital species
I think AI should best be understood as something like a new digital species. Now, don't take this too literally, but I predict that we'll come to see them as digital companions, new partners in the journeys of all our lives. Whether you think we’re on a 10-, 20- or 30-year path here, this is, in my view, the most accurate and most fundamentally honest way of describing what's actually coming. And above all, it enables everybody to prepare for and shape what comes next.
Suleyman isn’t the first to describe AI as a new species. Although I don’t know if it’s “most accurate and most fundamentally honest” way of looking at it, there’s a strong case to be made. Most of our tools are just tools, like our vacuum cleaner or dishwasher. However, when we use ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas or explore a difficult subject, that just feels different.
Describing AI as a digital species has its upsides. Working with AI is easiest if you think of it like a person rather than a machine, for example. One of the downsides of it is that people tend overestimate the capabilities of AI systems like GPT-4, which is something I wrote about in more detail in my article The Intelligence Paradox.
7:11 Endless river of creativity
Just a few years ago, people said that AI would never be creative. And yet AI now feels like an endless river of creativity, making poetry and images and music and video that stretch the imagination. People said it would never be empathetic. And yet today, millions of people enjoy meaningful conversations with AIs, talking about their hopes and dreams and helping them work through difficult emotional challenges. AIs can now drive cars, manage energy grids and even invent new molecules. Just a few years ago, each of these was impossible.
Things surely have progressed quickly. However, the core Transformer architecture powering most LLMs was introduced as early as 2017, in the influential paper Attention is all you need. In other words, it took us a while to get where we are. Everything changed when we figured out that the secret to unlocking its full potential was scale.
As a result of that, many of the things we deemed impossible have indeed become possible or suddenly feel within reach. Creativity is a good example of that; instinctively, it’s the last things we thought computers would be good at, yet they’ve been proven to be very capable at generating text, compelling imagery, video and even music.
What Suleyman fails to mention is that this ‘creativity’ is the sum of everything these models are trained on. It’s common knowledge that image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion have been trained on the works of countless talented artists who crafted those artworks. Today’s AI is entirely contingent on these precious sources of human creativity; without them, it wouldn’t exist.
9:12 Infinitely knowledgeable
So what does this mean in practice? Well, just as the internet gave us the browser and the smartphone gave us apps, the cloud-based supercomputer is ushering in a new era of ubiquitous AIs. Everything will soon be represented by a conversational interface. Or, to put it another way, a personal AI. And these AIs will be infinitely knowledgeable, and soon they'll be factually accurate and reliable. They'll have near-perfect IQ.
Now is a good time to remind ourselves that we aren’t just listening to a TED talk, we’re also listening to a sales pitch for the biggest technology company in the world. Suleyman is not just standing on this stage as himself, but also as a Microsoft-employee.
Saying AI will be “infinitely knowledgeable” and have “near-perfect IQ” isn’t a scientific claim by any stretch of the imagination. They are not statements of fact, but words of aspirations. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but the conviction with which he says these things might give off a different impression.
The claim that AI soon will be “factually accurate and reliable” sounds promising, but isn’t supported by any evidence either. It’s definitely something everyone hopes gets solved, but in reality no one knows about how to get rid of hallucinations, not even Suleyman.
14:30 The path to progress
Thinking in this way helps us focus on the huge challenges that lie ahead for all of us. But let's be clear. There is no path to progress where we leave technology behind. The prize for all of civilization is immense. We need solutions in health care and education, to our climate crisis. And if AI delivers just a fraction of its potential, the next decade is going to be the most productive in human history.
Here’s where things start to fall apart for me. The big problems facing humanity are always mentioned when there’s talk about the upsides of AI, but the how is always conveniently left out.
Suleyman doesn’t specify the ways in which AI intends to solve the biggest challenges we face nor how us becoming more productive would contribute to that utopian future. More shockingly, he brushes over the fact that AI can just as easy be used for bad by those who envision a less utopian future.
16:09 Infinite inventor
AI is to the mind what nuclear fusion is to energy. Limitless, abundant, world-changing. And AI really is different, and that means we have to think about it creatively and honestly. We have to push our analogies and our metaphors to the very limits to be able to grapple with what's coming. Because this is not just another invention. AI is itself an infinite inventor. And yes, this is exciting and promising and concerning and intriguing all at once. To be quite honest, it's pretty surreal.
Suleyman’s talk ends in more hyperbole. Words like “limitless, abundant, world-changing” do not match onto reality. AI is a energy-hungry technology that requires incredible amounts of resources, one of which is increasing amounts of water. And describing AI as an infinite inventor is a alluring alliteration, but completely contradictory to the current capabilities of these systems. (See what I did there?)
In the end, a lot of words were spoken but little was said. Suleyman didn’t make a strong case for why we should be humanizing AI and failed to explain how this perspective will help us mitigate potential harms. A missed opportunity, if you ask me. For someone who values accuracy and honesty, he sounded more like a preacher than a scientist.
Watch the talk in full here.
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I just found your blog, love it so far.
I'd push even more strongly against Suleyman's claim that AI is "creative". It's not just that it was trained on a vast collection of human-made images; it's that training consists of the model "learning" to reproduce what's in the training data. The whole goal is to imitate what it's been fed!
Now, the usual response is along the lines of "that's what humans do, too". And, of course, human creativity involves some amount of imitation. But obviously there's more, otherwise all art would be... I don't know, cave drawings? In the last couple hundred years we've seen so many art movements that were not, in fact, derivative of what came before: abstract expressionism, surrealism, cubism, impressionism, etc. In music, we've gone from classical to modernist to jazz, blues, rock'n'roll, country, hip-hop, heavy metal, punk, electronica, etc.
There is no generative AI technology in existence that can perform what is fundamental to human creativity: making art that is, at least in part, genuinely new.
"Today’s AI is entirely contingent on these precious sources of human creativity; without them, it wouldn’t exist."
You could say the same about us too.
Today’s human is entirely contingent on these precious sources of our creativity; without them, we wouldn’t exist.