Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, is trying to walk a fine line. On the one hand, he thinks that the industry is taking AI in a dangerous direction by building chatbots that present as human: He worries that people will be tricked into seeing life instead of lifelike behavior. In August, he published a much-discussed post on his personal blog that urged his peers to stop trying to make what he called " seemingly conscious artificial intelligence," or SCAI. On the other hand, Suleyman runs a product shop that must compete with those peers. Last week, Microsoft announced a string of updates to its Copilot chatbot, designed to boost its appeal in a crowded market in which customers can pick and choose between a pantheon of rival bots that already includes ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, and more.

Microsoft's AI Chief Says Machine Consciousness Is an'Illusion' Mustafa Suleyman says that designing AI systems to exceed human intelligence--and to mimic behavior that suggests consciousness--would be "dangerous and misguided." Mustafa Suleyman is not your average big tech executive. He dropped out of Oxford university as an undergrad to create the Muslim Youth Helpline, before teaming up with friends to cofound DeepMind, a company that blazed a trail in building game-playing AI systems before being acquired by Google in 2014. Suleyman left Google in 2022 to commercialize large language models (LLMs) and build empathetic chatbot assistants with a startup called Inflection. He then joined Microsoft as its first CEO of AI in March 2024 after the software giant invested in his company and hired most of its employees.

Mustafa Suleyman was at the center of an artificial intelligence revolution once before. As a cofounder of DeepMind, a British company acquired by Google in 2014, he helped devise a new way for computers to tackle seemingly impossible problems by combining practice with positive and negative feedback. DeepMind demonstrated the approach by developing a superhuman Go-playing program, AlphaGo, which defeated the world's best Go player in 2016. Now the CEO of Microsoft AI, Suleyman is talking up a new kind of AI breakthrough. As CEO of Microsoft AI, Suleyman oversees efforts to integrate the same AI that powers ChatGPT into software--including the Windows operating system--that runs most of the world's personal computers.

Microsoft now has a lone leader overseeing consumer AI for the first time. Suleyman will try to push the consumer-facing Copilot assistant into the future, preparing for what may be a long battle with Google for artificial intelligence supremacy among Silicon Valley's Big Five companies. Suleyman's official title will be executive vice president and CEO of a new division called Microsoft AI, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Joining him will be fellow Inflection AI cofounder Karén Simonyan, who takes the title of chief scientist. "Messy" could be one way to describe Microsoft's Copilot rollout.

What is it with wave metaphors? Technological determinists – people who believe that technology drives history – love them. Think of Alvin Toffler, who saw the history of civilisation as a succession of three such waves (agricultural, industrial and post-industrial). The idea is of immense power, unstoppable, moving inexorably towards us as we cower before its immensity, much as the dinosaurs must have done when they saw the mile-high tsunami heading in their direction. Mustafa Suleyman says he is not a determinist, but at times he sounds awfully like one.

But there's now a problem: the Turing test has almost been passed--it arguably already has been. The latest generation of large language models, systems that generate text with a coherence that just a few years ago would have seemed magical, are on the cusp of acing it. So where does that leave AI? And more important, where does it leave us? The truth is, I think we're in a moment of genuine confusion (or, perhaps more charitably, debate) about what's really happening.

Over the last decade, artificial intelligence has been a relentless source of business innovation. Over the last decade, artificial intelligence has been a relentless source of business innovation. Now its influence is about to expand dramatically. Once a staple of science fiction, AI has quietly forged a critical role in some of the most ordinary yet essential business tasks. Automation of business processes; data analysis; defect detection in manufacturing; basic interactions with customers -- all are an embedded part of modern business and increasingly enabled by AI.

While populist politicians lower the standards of public discourse and cynically ignore science and shun data-driven debate, Azeem reminds us each week in Exponential View what the curious mind can learn.

DeepMind, a Google-owned artificial intelligence company, has developed an AI system that can accurately identify 50 different types of eye condition as accurately as a doctor. The system -- capable of analysing 3D retinal OCT scans for early signs of conditions like glaucoma, diabetic eye disease and macular degeneration -- has been developed through a joint research partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital in London over the last 18 months. The AI, which can correctly identify types of eye disease from OCT scans 94.5% of the time, learned how to detect eye conditions by studying approximately 15,000 anonymous eye scans. The results of the trial were published in the journal Nature Medicine on Monday. DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman, who leads DeepMind Health, claimed in a blog post that the AI system could help to save people's sight, adding that it could one day be rolled out in hospitals around the world.

Humanity faces a wide range of challenges that are characterised by extreme complexity, from climate change to feeding and providing healthcare for an ever-expanding global population. Left unchecked, these phenomena have the potential to cause devastation on a previously untold scale. Fortunately, developments in AI could play an innovative role in helping us address these problems. At the same time, the successful integration of AI technologies into our social and economic world creates its own challenges. They could either help overcome economic inequality or they could worsen it if the benefits are not distributed widely.