The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Conversation with Mustafa Suleyman — The Proliferation of AI & the Next Wave of Technology

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI, joins Scott to discuss his new book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma.” We hear what to expect in the coming years and decades as AI gets smarter, why we’re not prepared for the coming wave of technology, and how Inflection AI wants to build the next version of a personal assistant. Check out Mustafa’s book here.  Scott is officially back from vacation and he’s excited to be on the mic. He opens by telling us about his travels. And then explains why he thinks Ozempic is shaping up to be the biggest business story of the summer.  Algebra of Happiness: Friendship endures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 266. 266 is the country code belonging to lasutu in 1966 the fifa world cup made its international television debut with live broadcasts and the barclay card which was launched by barclays became the first credit card in the uk true story someone has stolen my credit card and run up bills at some milf porn site. I guess I'm the victim of identity Freud. It's good to have me back, isn't it? Go, go, go!

Welcome to the 266th episode of the Prop G Pod. The dog is back on the mic. That's right. Put that kibble, put that peanut butter on the mic. The dog will just lap it up after a month away. What did I do? Let's talk a little bit about my white privilege. I like identity politics when I turn it on myself. Sort of the self-hating Democrat here. By the way, what are Democrats the most beautiful mountain town in the world. And then I was in Nantucket on a sandbar in the Atlantic, occasionally coming back to New York. I'm trying to take all of August off. Feels pretty good. Although I worry I'm never going to be able to actually come back.

I worry I'm going to come back and not be as good, as brilliant. Or, by the way, ladies, do you believe in love at first sight or should I walk by again? Hello. Anyway, Labor Day. I was so excited to be back at work, ready to get, I feel kind of vacationed out, which is a good problem, I guess. And then I wake up yesterday. I usually wake up in the morning. I check my text message, my assistant to see my calendar that day. And there was nothing on the calendar. I'm like, what the fuck? It's Monday. And then I realized it was Labor Day. So I am ready to be back. I'm glad to be back. I hope you're glad to be back. Fall in New York is just spectacular. It's spectacular. It's beautiful out. Everyone seems optimistic. I would argue, I would argue that this city is back better than

ever. It's really kind of shed its skin, and there are all these new restaurants popping up, and all of these new retail establishments. And Soho, I was here over the weekend, is just freaking Disneyland. It's packed with people spending money. And you want to talk about retail sales. There's a 20-minute line to get into Birkenstock. Birkenstock? There's a 20-minute line to get into Glossier. And it just strikes me that supposedly this recession that never showed up, you do not see it in Manhattan. And granted, that is a skewed view of things, but Jesus Christ, the economy seems again to be on fire. And what is it about New York City where it's come out of COVID feeling on a balanced scorecard stronger, and many of these other kind of left-leaning cities on the West Coast have come back weaker. They just haven't recovered to the sort of pre-pandemic levels.

We should have Richard Florida, who's sort of the city guru or my Yoda around cities, on to talk about that. And it was an interesting idea, but it's fantastic to be back in New York. I'm here for nine days until I go back for the beginning of my kid's school year back in London. And I absolutely love the fall in New York. Absolutely love it. So wonderful time off. I hope you had a wonderful summer. It's good to be back. Good to be with me. Good to be with you. Good to be together again. And we're going to bust right back into it. We don't have any real big goals for the podcast. The podcast has been growing about 30 to 40% in terms of audience a year and about our growing revenues about 20 to 30%, which must mean the CPMs are going down if our audience

is going faster than our CPMs. Don't know. Don't know. Anyway, so what have I been thinking a lot about lately? I was thinking, what is the most underreported business story of the summer? What is going to have a bigger impact than the media would lead you to believe? By the way, by the way, the funnest thing that's happened to me is hearing about every year I plan to go to Burning Man. I just think I've got to go

into something I need to do once. I need to check that box. My window is closing. I don't like to rough it. I'm not going to build some urd or some tent. I need to go to one of these douchebag camps where there's a bunch of chefs and Russian prostitutes. Not that there's anything wrong with either of those things. And pay up and really kind of do the kind of, I don't know, the privileged jerk tour of Burning Man. And every year I plan to go, and then it comes at a weird time and I end up canceling last minute as I did this year. And thank God I did. Oh my God, have you seen the pictures coming out of there? You know what? The only thing I can imagine that would be worse than being trapped at Burning Man is being trapped in a conversation with someone who's been to Burning Man. Jesus Christ. OK, it's great. We

get it. It's great. I'm going to go. Stop talking to me about it. Anyways, what is the most underreported business story of the year? The biggest business story of the year, Ozempic. For those that don't know, Ozempic is a drug for diabetes, but celebrities and TikTokers have brought it into the limelight as a weight loss kind of silver bullet. Other versions of this drug include Wagovi. I think, isn't that a type of Japanese beef? Anyway, these drugs essentially signal to the brain that you're less hungry and slow digestion, so you can't eat as much as you're used to. Ozempic is only FDA approved for treating

diabetes, while Ligovic can be prescribed for weight loss. Novo Nordisk, the Danish maker behind these drugs, recently surpassed LVMH in market capitalization to become the most valuable company in Europe. The Wall Street Journal noted that if Novo Nordisk were a U.S. company, it would be the 15th largest stock by value, ranking between JPMorgan Chase and MasterCard. The hashtag, hashtag Ozempic, has more than 1 billion views on TikTok. I just, I think this is huge, and I think it's going to have a ton of knock-on effects. According to the CDC, roughly 42% of adults age 20 and over are obese. That's 100 million adults. Think about this. The market is 100 million people. When you break it down by age, obesity prevalence is about 40% for those age 20 to 39 years old and 44% for those 40 to 59. It's about 42% for people age 60 and older, and that's where it gets really dangerous.

When it comes to children and adolescents, the percentage of adolescents age 12 to 19 years with obesity is 22%. Think about that. Almost one in four teens are obese. And for those age six to 11 years, it's around 21%. And it's around 13% for children aged two to five. Think about that. One in 10, or what is that? One in eight kids, toddlers are obese. The CDC also reports that the estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the U.S. was around $173 billion in 2019. The obesity drug market is expected to be worth $50 billion by 2030. Eli Lilly's diabetes treatment, Monjado, Monjado, that sounds like some sort of, that sounds like the next place they're going to film the White Lotus or something, which is also used for weight loss, brought in nearly 1 billion in

Q2 sales, more than 200 million above analyst expectations. The company said earlier in the year that this treatment helped overweight obese people with type 2 diabetes lose up to 16% of their body weight, or more than 34 pounds over about 17 months. Research behind Novo's drugs show that Ozempic and Wagovi have helped people lose on average 8 to 14 pounds and about 15% of their body weight, respectively. I just think this is, for lack of a better term, enormous. You know, 40% of the nation does not suffer from mental illness. It doesn't suffer, 40% does not suffer from high blood pressure or diabetes. Think about all the blockbuster drugs and what they feed off of, right? Literally obesity, I would argue, is probably the number one health issue facing

modern economies, especially in the US. If you don't think obesity is an enormous issue, for God's sake, just go to Disneyland. Jesus Christ. It's just nuts when you get a cross-section of America. And I think it's, I don't want to call it a conspiracy, but when it's raining money, you stop thinking about what's good for the world and can rationalize things. And I think essentially what you have is an industrial food complex that wants to get you addicted to trans fats, sodium, sugar, and then kind of hands you off to the industrial medical complex and wants to make $12,000 or $15,000 a year off of you from different medications you're going to have to take as a function of your obesity, whether it's diabetes or high blood pressure or what have you.

We don't like to talk about obesity in terms of just how bad it is for you, because there's a certain view on the left that if you are too harsh on or talk too much about obesity, I think, that you're fat shaming people. And so let me go hardcore into some fat shaming here or what I will be accused for fat shaming. I think this bullshit movement from the fashion industrial complex and I don't know, to a certain extent the media,

that people who are obese are somehow finding their truth, that there's something liberating about it. No, you're not finding your truth. You're finding diabetes. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't make investments in helping people have the economic opportunity to avoid food deserts and eat more healthfully. But we've also done really stupid things. We shame physical fitness now. I loved the Presidential Fitness Awards when I was in school. Remember that? Where they look at your age and say, okay, you should be able to be in, I think, the top decile or the top quartile of your peers. You need to do this many pull pride for me. And my understanding is a lot of these types of programs in school, look at type in 50s, 60s, and 70s fitness in high school, and you're going to see how seriously we took fitness.

And then there was a certain feeling that, okay, this is fat shaming, or this is somewhat discriminatory. And there is some truth to that. One of the things that fascinates me and is about to become an issue across the kind of emerging issue around college admissions where they have found, okay, should legacies get in? Well, probably not unless you're going to use that additional money and goodwill or that additional funding you get from the goodwill that legacies fill to expand seats, which people don't. Then how can you let legacies in when legacies traditionally are wider than the U.S. population because that's who was going to college

in the 60s and 70s? And then how do you, can you in fact, okay, if we're going to do away with affirmative action in colleges, shouldn't we do away with legacy admissions? The next place they're going to go is athletes. A friend of mine's son is going to a school that a third of the kids play sports. And if you look at the people who get scholarships to schools for sports, outside of football and basketball, it's generally kids from wealthy households, because it's kids from wealthy households that get to go to football and soccer camp

and lacrosse training and have the money to spend on coaching and equipment to develop them into elite athletes. So what do you know? Even sports, which was supposed to be the last vestige of meritocracy, is now, we're finding that it's the kids of rich people. I think that's going to be the next place we go around college admissions. But having said that, I find that we need to make investments, or I'd like to think we need to make investments to give people the opportunity to eat healthfully, but also bring back aspirational value and reward

people for being physically fit, especially at a young age. My father wasn't very involved in my life, but one of the things he did impart on me and my half-sister, my dad's third marriage, although we're quite close, and I don't think of her as my half-sister, I think of her as my seven, eight sister. Anyways, is that my dad, at a very young age, my dad took me, I remember this, taking me into the garage when I, he was still married to my mom, in Laguna Niguel. He took me to the garage, and he showed me this manual, and it was the Royal Navy workout, and it was a series of burpees, push-ups, sit-ups, some other stuff. And then we would do these exercises and then we would go running on the beach. And I started doing this at the age of eight and did it once or twice a

week with my dad. And it kind of just instilled the sense of fitness and I don't know, I like the feeling after it. You do get somewhat of a high from the norepinephrine that's flowing through your veins or whatever it is. But I have worked out four times a week for the last 40 years, and it's been just an enormous gift to me. I feel better about myself. I'm convinced it's the only thing standing between me and full-blown depression. And it's just got all sorts of benefits, much less health. I find even more than physical health, it's the mental health that really accrues benefits for me. And I've been very kind of fascinated or into Dr. Peter Attia's appearance on podcasts. And he said something that I thought was really powerful. And he said that essentially think of fitness is not about extending your life. He said, I'll show you the

last 10 years of your life. And the level or the quality of life of the last 10 years of your life when you work out and make those investments early is just so dramatically different than the life and the quality of life you have in your last 10 years when you don't work out. So I would love to think that we start to move back towards an appreciation and a recognition of how wonderful it is to be fit. And obesity is something that has emerged, in my opinion, in large part because of a corrupt industrial food complex, medical industrial complex that's more interested in being shareholder-driven than actually focused on the health of the United States. And they're kind of in this chocolate and peanut butter cahoots with each other, this corrupt informal alliance where it's like, okay, let's make kids fat and let's hand them over to you once they get diabetes and everybody makes money. And the healthcare system, which is subsidized,

or the costs are incurred by the government and taxpayers, well, sorry, you're shit out of luck. So a bunch of interesting things happen. Zempik and the weight loss is just striking. And I wonder what that's going to mean for the makers of salty snacks. And people say, well, they're not changing their habits. They're just changing the amount of food they're eating. Okay. But if people are eating less McDonald's, if people are eating less Doritos, you would think that both of those stocks or both of those companies would struggle. I think this kind of, I believe that almost everyone is going to be on one of these drugs that's obese. I don't see any reason not to. My understanding is the American Pediatric Association has actually approved this treatment for children. But I think this is, I don't think we've even scratched the

surface in terms of what it's going to mean for different industries. It's just, I think you're going to see a massive reshuffling or a market capitalization. When a company accretes tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization and it's growing faster than the economy, that means, or the sector, that means that there is, in fact, someone on the losing end of that. And if you think about what's happened with Google and Meta, on the wrong end of that, advertising garners about 2% to 3% of the economy for the last 100 years. 2% to 3% of GDP goes to some form of brand or product-based marketing. It doesn't go up, it doesn't go down. It's pretty resilient, but it doesn't really grow. So when Meta and Google are

growing, what is it, $20 to $50 billion in incremental growth a year, that means it's coming out of the hide of the traditional marketing industry. It just is. And you have seen WPP, IPG, Omnicom, Publicity, all become a shadow themselves. They're literally almost just an afterthought. Google and Meta lose the market capitalization of all of those companies in one trading day because these companies have grown faster than inflation, faster than the economy, which means it's coming out of the hide of somewhere else. You are going to see these companies, the manufacturers of these companies, grow their market capitalizations by hundreds of billions of dollars, and that is going to come out of someone else's hide. Now, who is that?

It'll probably be other drug companies. It'll probably most likely be, I would think, the industrial food complex as they see their trans fats. You know, the demand here is going to go down. The demand here is going to go down. Anyways, I believe the most important business story, the most underreported business story is not so much with Zempik, if you will, but the knock-on effects here. I think a decent investment strategy would be to think, what happens when 40% of America changes their health, changes their dietary habits, changes their mental well-being? I mean, it just changes the type of clothes they buy, changes the type of vacations they take, the types of cars they buy. I mean, so much of your

decision-making is informed by your physical form or your eating habits or your health. Think about this. Think about how much health impacts the way you live your life? Are we going to have, if 40% of America is obese and it goes to 20%, so we have 90 million people who are probably going to become more interested in, I don't know, mountain biking? What does it mean? What does it mean for sports? What does it mean for participation in sports? What does it mean? Do they over-index or under-index in gyms? Anyways, thinking about this a lot, think about this a lot. I think this is going to be a huge story, huge impact, a huge reshuffling, and what hopefully is an enormous unlock for American society, and that is a reduction in the body mass index of Americans. Zempik is the most underreported business story of the summer of 2023.

We'll be right back for our conversation with Mustafa Suleiman, the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI and the author of The Coming Wave, Technology Power, and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS wherever you get your podcasts. Support for this podcast

comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time. Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections

across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter digital relationships with their customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. Make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com slash BFCM. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Mustafa Suleiman, the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI and author of The Coming Wave, Technology Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma. Mustafa, where does this podcast find you? I'm actually in New York at the moment.

I'm here for the week promoting my book. Oh, congratulations. And welcome to New York. Fall in New York at the moment. I'm here for the week promoting my book. Oh, congratulations. And welcome to New York. Fall in New York is wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, this is the best time to be here. It's pretty hot today, though. Yeah, it is warm. So let's bust right into it. In your new book, The Coming Wave, you explore the next wave of technology that you believe will alter our conception of intelligence and life. Let's unpack that. What are we up against, or what do you mean that we're going to alter our conception of intelligence and life? Well, these two new technologies, that is synthetic biology, the ability to engineer new synthetic compounds, or life itself, and artificial intelligence, the ability to

engineer software systems that can learn their own strategies to perform well at new types of prediction problems. These two are different to previous types of technologies. In the past, a tool or a technology enabled a human to carry out some work more and they have the ability to evolve or improve themselves independently of human oversight, if they are designed to do that. And in some sense, they also have the ability to define their own goals. Again, a new characteristic of technology has never been able to define its own goal, to improve its own performance or behavior in some sense, and to operate autonomously. Now, none of those features or characteristics are possible today. They are not capabilities that AI can do today. But they are capabilities that many researchers and some of the big labs have been working on for

some time. And over the last few years, everybody can now see the exponential improvement in, you know, the trajectory of our progress. And so my book is really trying to predict what that might look like over a 5, 10, and 20-year period, and then what we might do about it. So examples of the former, how technology kind of scales human activity. So you have a bulldozer, and a guy with a shovel can't move as much earth as someone with a bulldozer. What are some examples or practical examples of what you're talking about? Well, today, you know, AI, for example, I think is going to be, you know,

you could argue like a bulldozer for the mind. I mean, it is going to reduce the cost of decision-making and reduce the cost of synthesizing, interpreting, and predicting, which is basically the essence of intelligence. What makes us capable, what makes you so capable as an individual, your expertise, is consuming vast amounts of data and making speculations or predictions about the past and reflecting on those,

whether they turn out to be true or not, and then updating and iterating on what you say next. We do that in pretty much every role that we do in professional life. And that is exactly what these AIs now do. In many respects, it will make us more productive and make us more efficient. So on the face of it, I think that is an incredibly positive story about what's going to happen over the next few decades. So in addition to AI, some of the technologies you describe in your book, Mustafa, include biotech, robotics, quantum computing, new sources of energy. How do all of these intersect,

or is there an intersection? And could you attempt to stack rank them in terms of importance? Yeah. Well, the common theme, which I actually found when I started doing the research from the book and looking back through the history of technologies is that to the extent a new technology is valuable and useful, clearly there becomes huge demand for it. And so it gets cheaper and more efficient. I mean, it sounds kind of like an obvious statement of fact to point that out, but it bears repeating because if indeed that is a law of technology, if it is like a fundamental property that things that are useful get cheaper and easier to use, it means that they spread far and wide. And the rate of change in the last five decades, first in microchips and then in software itself,

is truly unprecedented. I mean, that word gets overused, but it really, really is exceptional. We're now seeing massive exponential increase in the total amount of compute used to train cutting-edge AI models. 10x, in fact, compute every single year for the last 10 years. Moore's law, which everybody is familiar with, is a simple doubling every 18 months of transistor density per dollar. And that has been consistently going since the 60s, which is a remarkable achievement in itself and has led to all sorts of incredible benefits that are unquestionable. But it actually pales into insignificance when compared to the trajectory that we see in software. And I predict that we're about to see the same

mass proliferation in a highly meritocratic way of intelligence and tools as we did with access to hardware. Today, whether you are a billionaire or you earn the minimum wage, broadly speaking, you get access, if you're living in the first world, to a smartphone and a laptop, which is just as good as everybody else. That's an unbelievable, positive story. And I think over the next decade, many hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people, are going to get the same equal access to an intelligence, as I described earlier, the ability to synthesize, plan, and predict. And I think that's going to be one of the greatest boosts to productivity that we've seen in human history. You said that we're not prepared for the proliferation of these technologies. How so, and what is the manifestation or the downside of not being prepared for them? Well, in some ways, this is a compression of power, right?

So if knowledge is power, then the ability to act on knowledge is like the ultimate source of power. To take accurate, precise, reliable actions in some environment is actually key to being effective as a decision maker of any type and if these ais now get good at not just distilling knowledge but taking actions which they will they will learn to use apis they will make calls into third-party knowledge bases, third-party databases to retrieve information, to book things and buy things. They will learn to use the front end of a website. So instead of even needing an API, they'll be able to enter text in the correct text box. They'll be able to click on the right thing, they'll be able to read the pixels on the screen, they'll be able to phone other AIs and have a natural language conversation between two AIs about price, about availability, about

negotiation terms, about some creative endeavor. And we would want them to do that in plain English so that there is an auditable record of that interaction they could well do it in embedding space but we we don't really want that from an explainability perspective and then of course they could phone humans and collect information and clarify what's required in any given setting so that kind of is in some ways a compression of power it's the ability to reason over information and take action in multiple different settings. That's what these AIs will be capable of doing. So that's great from a productivity perspective and for those who really want to do good with those tools. But clearly there are going to be many people who, you know, want to broadcast their agenda,

their agency into the world. You know, in that sense, AI is going to be the kind of manifestation of the best and worst of us, just as the social media age has been exactly that, right? You know, we've eliminated the barrier to entry to be able to broadcast in social media. Anyone can now do it. You don't have to have a license and a good education and be part of an established newspaper like you did 20 years ago. Everyone can now broadcast. And on the face of it, that's an amazing thing. It's produced unbelievable benefit, and we should praise it to the max. At the same time, it's also caused quite a lot of chaos. And I think that what we're headed towards now is not just the ability to say things, right? But AI is with the ability to do things. And so I think then, you know, sort of up

to your own imagination to imagine what kinds of people might get access to a cheap tool for getting stuff done in order to, you know, spread misinformation, sow instability, you know, amplify polarization, take your pick of whatever concern you might have. Do you, and I'll reflect a bias here, I consider myself an AI optimist, and I find that there's a certain level of techno-narcissism where the founders or the people central to a technology either see it as a singular point of saving civilization or destroying it. And I find a lot of the AI, the original gangsters in AI

are like, well, I'm Dr. Frankenstein and I'm worried about Frank, which I don't find that helpful. Do you think there's catastrophizing here? Do you think, or it's overstated or we should be more worried? Where are you on the catastrophist AI scale here? Do you think it's overstated or we should be more worried? Where are you on the catastrophist AI scale here? So I find the kind of, are you an optimist or are you a pessimist frame of the

question sort of almost not that helpful because both are biases. I mean, what I'm trying to do is do my very best to cleanly describe the capabilities that are about to arrive and try to sort of offer that prediction to other people to interpret from their vantage point, given their expertise, what you think the consequences are for the world that you know best, you know, whether it's academia or politics or media or commerce, whatever it is, these capabilities are coming. So my goal with my book and with a lot of my work is to try to just describe what I see coming. And that then sometimes makes people feel very uncomfortable, makes people then say that I'm a pessimist or I'm an optimist. I agree with you that there's a lot of catastrophizing here and there is a bit of panic. And that's natural with the arrival of any new technology. Like we've actually had that through most of the waves in the past, you know, from, you know, even the motor car or the arrival of the railway or the, you know, the first airplanes. I mean, you know, initially it was very scary, the idea of going up in a plane, and now it's one of the safest modes of transport. So I think we

do adapt. And I think that, you know, that's the process of desensitization and adaptation that we're going through at the moment. I think we've all just got to be patient with everybody wrapping their heads around, what does that mean? And so I can see that, I'll use Google as an example. I always thought Google's genius from a shareholder perspective is that everybody has to use it, but no one can develop competitive advantage using it. So it turns from a point of differentiation to a tax. And there's one company that has garnered, as far as I can tell, the majority of the shareholder increase from this unbelievable technology called search. Whereas, and I don't

know if this is the right analogy, something like mobile or GPS, it seems like a lot of companies have sprouted up and made a lot of money. Do you see these types of technologies as great levelers that will create a lot of different ecosystems of value or that there'll be a small number of players that will recognize the majority of the gains? I think that this technology is going to be quite different in the sense that many, many players are going to be able to use them for huge productivity gains. And the reason I say that is because, you know, we're seeing these compounding exponentials, both in terms of the size of the models, but also the models are able to achieve a fixed capability, but they get smaller. So they're shrinking as well as expanding. So let me just give you an example of that. In 2020, in June 2020, when GBT3 was released, that had 175 billion parameters.

And roughly speaking, the number of parameters gives you a sense of how expensive it is to run a query against it, to serve it, right? And today, you can achieve the same capabilities measured by a whole suite of independent benchmarks, question answering and knowledge synthesis and reading and comprehension and so on, factuality, with a model that is 2 billion parameters. So that's a remarkable achievement because it's that much cheaper to serve. So what's going to happen over the next 10 and 20 years is that the models are going to get smaller and smaller while still being able to achieve the same sort of capabilities performance with the quality of their generations.

And that means that those models are going to spread far and wide, which means that anybody will be able to take advantage of a model like that. You know, no matter how strong the lock-in, you know, the threshold of capability that we are crashing through is human expertise. You're actually measuring it against, can a human do a better job of reading this passage and rewriting it in the style of X, right? Or can it do a better job of answering a couple of questions about this passage or giving you the perfect answer to something? So we're getting more and more efficient at producing smaller and smaller models that can perform as well as a human or as the really big models. And that is going to continue. That efficiency trajectory is one that we've seen for hundreds and hundreds of years and

is going to continue with respect to AI, which is a great story on the face of it because it means there isn't an obvious way there is going to be lock-in, in my opinion, over the long term. Over the short term, there will be. Over five years to 10 years, the big companies are going to be able to produce the highest quality, in my opinion, and people will turn to those companies first. So they'll get a compounding effect because they'll end up with sort of control of distribution and they'll control the market in the way that Google has with search. In some ways, Google's technology is cool and is valuable, but what they've really got

is lock-in on both sides of the marketplace, right? They've got the brand, so people are very comfortable coming back to it. And they've got the advertisers who are comfortable advertising with them. So it's a sort of lock-in. It's a three-way lock-in between the technology, the users, and the ads. And that comes from having a first mover advantage. And when people talk about AI and they talk about the fears, generally, I think it's sort of one of four things that this thing becomes sentient and decides in a nanosecond that we that start go rogue and decide that, you know, just get better and better at killing people.

Do you think do you see any of these being the what do you think is the biggest threat across these things or am I missing one of them? So I think the good news is that the bigger these models get, the more controllable they are. And that was not obvious to a lot of people three years ago. When GBT-3 first came out, a lot of the panic was about, oh, this is going to be toxic. It's going to be biased. It's going to constantly produce misinformation. It's going to give you reassuringly inaccurate information and so on. Actually, that's turned out not to be true. So I think when predicting how things, what the implications are likely to be over the next few years and decade, it's important to sort of hold in your working memory the idea that these models are going to be really, really good and really accurate, and they will behave as intended so i'm pretty skeptical that

that there are unintended intelligence explosions where the ai gets out the box it manipulates you it takes over i think all these fantasy sci-fi things are actually a complete distraction i think it's much more likely that the traditional threats we face where bad actors who want to use existing tools to destabilize our world are suddenly going to have an easier time of it i mean that is for sure true like one example is that you know some of these models all of the models are trained on you know vast amounts of open web data which includes information on for example how to manufacture a biological chemical weapon. And because the models are pretty good at coaching you, you know, you can get into an

iterative back and forth, you know, it actually reduces the complexity of trying to engineer a potentially dangerous biological weapon. And we've actually observed this in multiple models, and we are coordinating across the labs with Anthropic and OpenAI and DeepMind and my company, Inflection, on how to suppress these kinds of generations and share best practices among us. So those, to me, are the kinds of threats that we have to practically work on in the near term, and they're actually relatively easy to take care of. And if open source, you know, providers and open source, you know, producers of these models also participate in that, then I think that just like we did with spam back in the 90s and 2000s, I think we'll just make progress on these problems one after another, we'll just tackle them. And generally, you know, I think we'll be able to mitigate a lot of the downsides in order to get, you know, the full benefit out of these things.

We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Indeed. If you need to hire, you may need Indeed. Indeed is a matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Listeners of this show can get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things, and it's never too late to reinvent yourself.

The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature. Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. So there's a pattern to new technologies and it roughly goes, there's an innovation. There's a lot of short-term concerns around job loss, and there usually is some job loss in the short run.

And then, you know, automation did destroy jobs in the factory floor and the automobile industry, but we could envision heated seats and car stereos, and we end up with more jobs. It feels to me that it's the same here, that this is going to spawn a ton of new startups and new opportunities? Am I missing something? Again, I think it depends on the time horizon. I think I find it harder to believe that over a longer time horizon. And I find that almost certain over a shorter time horizon. So over the next decade, I don't think we're at any risk of large scale structural disemployment where there are millions of people who cannot contribute their labor to the market right i think there's going to be a transition issue where people will have to train adapt and find new opportunities in the workplace and so on um however over a 30-year period as i squint you know i think that is a i i think it is harder to see how we end up with full employment obviously it's hard to know

it's hard to imagine what new demand we're going to have um but what i can see is that this is a very general purpose technology i mean if intelligence really does become a commodity then we really will be able to do radically more with less. And I think that, you know, to have hundreds of millions of more intelligences in the world, albeit aids, you know, research assistance to creators and scientists, is, I think, going to increase the likelihood that we make real progress towards significant abundance. You know, I think you mentioned energy production earlier. You know, I also think about synthetic food. I think about water desalination. I think about, you know, carbon sequestration. And we have these huge

scientific challenges that we have to tackle over the next 20 years in order to flourish as a species, you know, as we move towards 10 billion people over the next century. And what we need more than ever are tools and aids to help us to solve those tough social problems. And so I feel very optimistic that that's where most of our energy is going to, you know, be focused. And that's where we're going to see huge productivity gains. But that doesn't necessarily mean full employment for everybody on the planet. Right. And that's where I sort of maybe I'm a bit more concerned over a 20 year period that there will be significant disemployment, people who can't, you know, compete in the workplace. Have you given any thought around policy recommendations around if you were advising,

you know, someone on the center, you know, the head of the Commerce Committee, what we should be thinking about? Because I would argue that robotics have been good for prosperity, but we've missed out on progress because we didn't think much about the people who got left behind. What are your thoughts? Yeah. I mean, I think that the trajectory that we're on is that we are sort of converting value that has been created by labor into value that is held in capital. So capital is going to compound far more quickly because capital was previously, you know, intelligence was previously labor. Now intelligence is going to become capital. And that's going to compound far more quickly because it is a commodity that can be

traded and exchanged. And so that on the face of it is a good thing because it accelerates our productivity. And I don't think the goal of society is to have people work for the sake of work, right? The end state is not work. The end state to me is productivity and freeing people a purpose. Yeah, exactly. And freeing people from the obligation of working in ways that they don't want to work. And I think that given the choice, people will find creative having to think about it. And there's going to be a big identity shift in what it means to be alive in 20, 30 years, because, you know, things are going to get radically cheaper. You know, food will get cheaper, transportation will get cheaper. You know, energy is the bedrock of the price of absolutely everything in society. And we are making radical progress on that front. And, you know, if we are successful in really reducing it to, you know, something near zero

marginal cost, the price of everything comes down, which is great for everybody. So that, I think, has got to be seen as the end state. And the question is, how do we manage the transition? So today, we tax, you you know labor more than we tax capital so we all know that taxation is a tool for speeding up or slowing down some things so if we want to make decisions like that rather than talk about ubi which is too politicized and hand wavy let's just talk about the current levers that we do have for slowing down adoption of some things and speeding up adoption of other things. And in my mind, that means reducing taxes on labor so that people can stay competitive in work for longer against the machines or against capital, increasing taxes on capital.

That means land. That means stocks. It means, you know, obviously software, you know, particularly AI. And I think that's the natural course of things over the next sort of 10 to 20 years. When you think about economic growth and as it relates to tax policy, do you think that we're doing a good job of inspiring the right? I mean, there has been, UBI is now a conversation. It used to be totally dismissed. People actually talk about it now. Do you think where the public policy is adapting here? Do you think we're up to it? Do you think we need more young people in Congress, elected officials? What do you see? What is the gap between public policy and how fast this technology is moving? Do you have any thoughts around how we should be thinking to adapt with the times. And we need public officials in every area who, you know, really get it and aren't just technical, but are living and breathing amongst this new digital revolution. You know, I don't have an obvious prescription as to how to correct for that, but I think everybody agrees with that part of the diagnosis. It's a huge problem um and you

know i i think that we've got to figure out how to get people to have more confidence in the state and more more care for and love for the state like if anything i've tried to frame my book as a like love letter to the nation state like i I really believe the nation state has to survive and we're going to need it more than ever. We're going to need a good, well-functioning mechanism for redistribution. You know, so some obvious things that we should be doing is that every cabinet should have a VP of engineering or a CTO. I mean, it's criminal that there isn't a technical decision maker, you know, at the top of governments and in, you know, public departments of work and so on. I think the second thing is, you know, we have to be prepared

to pay public sector wages commensurate with what the open market, you know, sort of declares the price of that skill, right? I mean, the fact that we expect people to take a 5 to 10x salary cut just for quote-unquote public service, it makes no sense. That makes no sense. From a completely self-interested perspective, you want the nation state to have the best quality people. And that means that you do have to pay for them. I mean, there are some other issues there with how you hold that power accountable and so on. It's not completely straightforward. But this idea that you'll get the best people in the world, you know, by paying a fraction of what they can earn in the open, you know, labor market is, I think, misguided. And that's obviously a really sensitive topic. But we have to confront these sort of difficult challenges if we want really high quality civil servants running our countries. So you said something, and I will get to Inflection AI, but something that is a passion point for us here, and that is you said that we need more respect or need to kind of a love letter to the nation state. And

you roll with a pretty fast crowd. My guess is you're on speed dial to every major player in tech. And I find it heartening. I'm a big fan of Reid, Hoffman, Bill, and Eric Schmidt. And I find that they both generally have an appreciation for government. And then there's an entirely different sector of innovators who I feel like are growing, at least in terms, I don't know if they're numbers, but their voice, that for lack of a better term, are just in the business of shitposting government. And basically, kind of position government is the bad guy. And I find it very disheartening. I would argue every major technology has been funded by the middle class. And the most valuable companies in the world build this thick layer of innovation

on top of investments in technology made by middle class taxpayers with the world's most successful venture capitalists, the US government. So one, do you agree with that? And two, what is it about the tech community or components of the tech community that seems so hostile towards government? And try and portray government and regulation employees as just, you know, you should just get out of the way and you don't get it. Yeah. I mean, I think that the broader problem isn't just the tech problem. I think it's an elite problem. I think that once people have been successful, they have the natural bias that leads them, confirmation bias that leads them to conclude

that it was their success and their hard work alone. You know, I did it. It was me. And when I failed, it was the market's fault absolutely yeah and so i see it across the board in in you know in finance in media in all all the sectors are are skeptical of governments um and it's probably because they haven't actually had the chance to work in those governments or seen how hard it is to get things done like the number of times i hear people say oh i i was was, you know, fixing the housing crisis, I would do this, or these idiots can't do that. It's like, dude, you've never run, never been involved in a really difficult, thorny social problem where you can't easily be measured by dollar and, you know, dollars and profit and the basic equation

of a P&L. There's just a lack of humility there. And I think we all need to be a bit more forgiving and respectful and kind to civil servants who are choosing to, you know, try to make our country work. I mean, in some ways, one thing I really like about the US is that there's real respect for the military, the fire service, the police department, and, you know, first responders. I think we need to, you know, we have that less in the UK and in Europe. And I think that we need to extend that same respect that we have for first responders to, you know, members of the State Department and people who work in education and, you know, other policymakers and decision makers. Talk to us about Inflection AI. So at Inflection, we're developing a personal AI. It's called Pi.

It's our personal intelligence. I think that over the next few years, everyone in the world is going to have their own personal AI. So all businesses and brands and celebrities are all going to have their own AIs. And just like in the last wave of technology in the last decade or so of social media, those commercial AIs are going to try to sell you stuff. They'reimately, and is helping you to synthesize and sort for credible information online, to learn, you know, new information, to interact with other AIs, and generally function as your chief of staff, you know, helping you prioritize your day, plan your weekend, stay true to your New Year's resolutions and your goals for the year, et cetera, et cetera. And your personal AI, your PI,

will interact with other AIs, with your friends, with your family, with other sales AIs, other brand AIs, and really help you to be productive, you know, with other sales AIs, other brand AIs, and really help you to be productive, be efficient, have fun, learn, think, and do. And I mean, this year, your startup is, I mean, you have arguably the most blue chip investors ever. My understanding is you just raised it a $4 billion valuation. How does a company like Inflection AI, what are the applications that ultimately result in some type of business model that can support that kind of valuation? Yeah, it's a fair question. I'm committed to a business

model where the user pays. And that I think think, is the right thing to do. It is not the maximally profitable thing to do. We are a public benefit corporation, which means that first and foremost, whilst I am focused on returning value to my shareholders as a number one priority, my adjacent equal number two priority is to make sure we do the right thing. And I think

that means resetting the business model of attention and distraction and creating this fiduciary relationship between you and your chief of staff or your personal AI, just as you wouldn't want someone else paying your lawyer or your accountant or indeed your doctor that might not be you that might have their own you know agenda you certainly wouldn't want your personal assistant and your chief of staff to be funded by ads or funded by some other random business model that does mean that you're going to have to pay and so our goal is to focus on a subscription approach and really create a personal AI that's on your side and aligned with your interests. I hope and I expect that many people will be prepared to pay for that

kind of experience. Where do you live, Mustafa? I live in Palo Alto, of course, in Silicon Valley. So as someone, I went to Berkeley, I lived in the Bay Area for a decade, started companies there in the 90s, and then started heading east. Now I live in London. I'm curious to get your kind of compare and contrast living in Palo Alto versus London or US for not versus US contrast, compare and contrast US and UK. it is night and day i felt i've been traveling to silicon valley since 2010 you know um we were acquired by google deep mind i co-founded deep mind were acquired by google in 2014 so i've been traveling there for a very long time and i have a sense for you know had a sense for the culture but when i moved there full-time in 2019 is just a complete you shift. The confidence, the optimism, the encouragement of failure, the kind of hopefulness,

the fearlessness about what we can make and produce. No one looks ridiculous or silly. No one's trying to take you down a peg or two. And I just got ground down in London over the years with the kind of lack of self-confidence of the country and the kind of petty sort of bickering and snarkiness in the media and in the kind of, you know, just in the London scene in general. You know, I'm a real believer, like, you know, in like making things happen happen making mistakes and picking up and moving

forward and that's just not a very british default attitude it's like embarrassing if you if you know if you screw up or if you get it wrong or if you make a mistake or if you have a failed startup and so on um you know not not that d mind was a failed startup it was incredibly successful but just the culture just wasn't encouraging of craziness and risk-taking. And I love that. And I love trying to, I'm a natural futurist, you know, I just by default think about how things are likely to play out in the future. And what I found in London was that I was sort of running into people who just looked at me like I was, you know, smoking something. And then when I'm in Silicon Valley, people, you know, something and then when i'm in silicon valley people you know challenge me

exactly they're on they're too busy on acid and mushrooms that's right yeah i i i think you're right on the way i describe it is in the u.s most business meetings start from position of yes and in the uk the business meetings in Europe generally, business startup, they start from a position of like, you know, probably not. It just not, it starts from a much more skeptical viewpoint. And just from a lifestyle perspective, and I'm interested, I don't know if you have kids or, I mean, you're living in two entirely different cultures right now. The way I would describe it is the US is still the best place in the world to make money, but Europe's still the best place to spend it. Your thoughts? You know, I find myself a kind of, you know, visiting lots of different places of the U.S. now. And I'm I kind of I like being here. I can't imagine sort of going back to Europe anytime soon.

So you're loving it. Bottom line is you're loving America. I'm deep in the California game. You know what they say about the Brits. When you get them to California, they never go back. I think Santa Monica being one of those largest concentration of Brits outside of, yeah, they love the sunshine. Yeah. Is that right? And to wrap up here, obviously the most important thing, your club in Premier League football? Arsenal. I grew up there. Oh, my God. We have to be friends. Bukaya Saka, did you see the game on Sunday? I did not. No, I've been in New York doing my book stuff, so I haven't seen anything. Oh, in extra minutes, two goals to go of 3-1 against Man U.

Yeah, I just, I am, literally one of the reasons we moved to London is I use football as a means of kind of connecting with my sons. And I find there's just, that Premier League football is just singular. And my oldest is Tottenham, my youngest is Chelsea, and I'm Arsenal. I just, have you gone to. Have you been enjoying any sports while you're in California? Yeah, I've been to a few ballgames, actually, and I've been getting into it. It's fun. I end up leaving five or ten pounds heavier at the end of the day, but I guess that's part of the spirit. That's called America. Eating and drinking. Yeah, that's America.

Mustafa Suleiman is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, a personal AI service. Previously, he worked at Google as a VP of AI products and AI policy. Before that, he co-founded DeepMind, which was bought by Google in 2014. His new book, The Coming Way of Technology Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma, is out now. He joins us from Palo Alto and most importantly is a gunner. Is that what they call us? A gunner? That's right. Oh, a gunner. Yeah, there you go. I wish you the best of luck. And not only because you're an impressive guy, but I really hope that more uber successful people like yourself continue to promote and evangelize what is, in my view, the most noble organization in history,

and that is Western and democratic governments. And I think we need more people like yourself and your backers evangelizing our connective tissue, and that is our respective governments. Anyways, best of luck to you, Mustafa. Absolutely. Thanks a lot. Cheers for having me, Scott. Algebra of Happiness. It's been a wonderful and yet a tragic summer. So wonderful in the sense I got to spend a lot of time with my boys. I've been exceptionally blessed and have the flexibility and resources now to spend a lot of time with my boys and do wonderful things over the summer. It's also been a summer of tragedy. I unexpectedly have lost two friends. My first friend, Scott Sabah, who was kind of, for lack of a better term, my wingman in New York. Whenever I'm in New York, I'd call Scott and we'd go. He always knew kind of the cool restaurant. We both love to go out, eat, drink. We traveled a lot together. Anyways, about

18 months ago, we came back from Tulum, a group of guys, and Scott had a bump on his head and went and got it checked out and ended up he had leuke when, but no problem, we can handle this. Was told we'd need chemotherapy. They can handle it with drugs. When the drugs aren't working, we need to do chemo. The chemo's not working, we need to do more toxic or stronger chemo to the point where he needed to be hospitalized

when he was doing the chemo. Oh no, the chemo's not working. We have to do a stem cell transplant. Son is a donor, does the transplant, successful. Incredible technology, literally resets your blood type. We're in the clear. Oh, no, we're not in the clear. It's back. And it's converted to something, I believe it's called Richter's. And Scott died in the hospital. And this was, you know, 54, good shape, successful, survived by his parents and his three kids, you know, a real tragedy. And then about a month later, my freshman roommate from college, Craig Marcus, was diagnosed with, I think it's called Ghislaine-Barr syndrome.

It's sort of a bacterial nerve disorder. Craig was the kid in our fraternity who was the creative one. I was designing the shirts, went to, I think it was called California School of Art and Design, and shot out professionally more quickly than any of us. And by the time he was in his early 30s, was like a creative director at a big ad agency. And one of those guys, no one had anything ever bad to say about, this incredibly just nice, sweet guy. And developed this disease, thought he was getting better. And good news about the disease is you can make a full recovery. Discharged from the hospital into a rehab clinic to kind of get his strength back. Took a turn for the worse,

back to the hospital, on his way to take a test, and his heart stopped and never started again. Again, survived by his parents and two boys. And this isn't, there's no real kind of deep inside here. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what happened, though I think it's one of those things or two of these things where you just don't ever wrap your head around it. The observation, though, is the thing that really struck me, especially in the case of Craig, is that immediately, immediately when he was in the hospital, there was like this picture of eight of us from the fraternity who we kind of all lived together our freshman and sophomore year. Three of those guys, David Kingsdale, Jeff Browdy, and Gary Leshgold, you know,

these are guys with very busy lives, very successful families. All three of them immediately got on planes in Los Angeles to come spend time with Craig in the hospital several times while he was in the hospital. And then when Craig unexpectedly passed, immediately got on planes and came back and did things like empty out his apartment, find the life insurance policy, organize the service. We actually ended up doing the service at my place a couple weeks ago. 150 people showed up. Anyways, but these were three guys who immediately just wanted to do what they could for Craig and his loved ones. And it got me thinking about friendship and not only the benefits of the importance of friendship, but how bad a lot of men are at it and what a tragedy that is.

One in four men say they don't have a best friend. One in seven men say they don't have a single friend. And it not only diminishes or erodes your life while you're alive, obviously, you're more likely to live longer when you have good friends. But it also, friendship is something that endures. These guys gave Craig, and it's a tragedy, but they gave him a good death. And I think that that is such a nice testament, not only to Craig, but it's a testament to how important friendship is, that you want to push the limits of your comfort zone. You want to express friendship to other people because when something happens

and you can't be here, you want people who, by virtue of caring for you and loving you, care for and love your offspring. So friendship endures. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer, and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show. Why are we genetically or anthropologically predisposed to being allergic to geese? Are we not supposed to be around geese? Right?

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