Taxi-driver’s son whose rivalry with an old friend will shape AI

They were old friends from north London who built Britain’s most successful AI company. Now they are set to lock horns as rivals in the Big Tech battle to dominate the technology.

Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman are co-founders of DeepMind, an AI research company they sold to Google in 2014 for $650 million. Hassabis still runs the company along with Google’s entire AI effort.

But this week Suleyman, who left DeepMind under a cloud in 2019, was appointed as head of rival Microsoft’s consumer AI division. In this head-to-head, whoever succeeds could define how we all interact with AI in the years to come.

According to Suleyman, it started over a game of poker. He and Hassabis were playing in a tournament at the Victoria Casino in Edgware Road, London in the mid 2000s. Both had been knocked out early.

“We’re talking about the future of the world. Both of us have always been interested in ‘how do we impact the world? What does the future look like?’ We’ve both been very, very long-term thinkers,” he said last year.

Technology was to be his vector of change. Their conversations about machine learning led Suleyman to sneak into lectures at University College London with Hassabis, who was doing a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. There they met Shane Legg, an AI researcher from New Zealand.

The trio would go on, in 2010, to found DeepMind, which has become synonymous with spectacular AI breakthroughs. Among them are AlphaGo, the AI programme that mastered the complex board game of Go and defeated the world champion in 2016 and AlphaFold, which predicts the structure of proteins, heralding faster drug discovery.

Suleyman owned 4.5 per cent of DeepMind and the sale valued his stake at just under $30 million, meaning he was set up for life. However, the trio parted ways when Suleyman was forced out of the company in 2019 after being investigated for bullying staff.

Hassabis, who lives in London and Suleyman, a resident of Palo Alto, California are today “not super close”, according to a source.

Someone connected to DeepMind at the time of the allegations told The Times: “There was a little bit of a reign of terror with him [Suleyman] and a small group of enforcers who had a relatively limited tolerance for things going wrong.

“People would get berated down the phone and things like that, and emerge crying from encounters. There was a reason the guy was pushed out.”

In 2022, Suleyman said of those events: “I really screwed up. I was very demanding, and pretty relentless. I think that at times that created an environment where I basically had pretty unreasonable expectations of what people were to be delivering and when, and ended up being pretty hard charging, and that created a very rough environment for some people. I remain very sorry about the impact that that caused people and the hurt that people felt there.”

He added that he has undertaken coaching to address this.

Suleyman went on to work at Google in the US and then founded an AI startup called Inflection, which was effectively acquired by Microsoft this week. He has also positioned himself as a leading thinker on the future of AI, writing a book last year called The Coming Wave, which warns about the need to set controls on the technology.

Suleyman evokes strong opinions from those in the tech community and some Google employees were less than kind on Twitter/X when they heard about his appointment. Some feel this stems from his management style while others feel it is from a snobbishness among AI researchers that he is not from a technical background.

Policy and social justice appear to be his passions. He dropped out of his Oxford philosophy course after a year to join the Muslim Youth Helpline, a counselling service, in 2003. From there he became a human rights researcher for Ken Livingstone, then mayor of London. After stints at the UN, WWF and Dutch government, among others, he co-founded Reos Partners, a conflict-resolution consultancy. At each turn he hit a wall, frustrated at the limit of his impact on the world. Then he teamed up with Hassabis, who was his brother’s best friend.

“He really won the lottery when he became friends with Demis,” said Pedro Domingos, professor of computer science at the University of Washington, who has strong links to the AI industry. He added: “But at the end of the day, if you look at the stuff that was really successful at DeepMind, he wasn’t responsible for it. And the stuff that he was responsible for was never very successful, that I know.”

At DeepMind Suleyman ran Applied, the health section. One of its contracts with the NHS was ruled to have broken privacy laws in 2017. Suleyman, however, also started a project between DeepMind/Google and Moorfields Eye Hospital to create an AI system that can diagnose using retinal scans. It is still running and aims to scan more than one million people on a commercial basis.

Professor Pearse Keane, a consultant at Moorfields who worked with Suleyman, said: “I think he’s an amazing guy. He’s clearly fiercely intelligent. He was not an engineer, he was not technical, but somehow could kind of bring a different perspective, because he could apply his intelligence to ask some good questions.”

That different perspective could stem from a working-class, strict Muslim upbringing in north London. His father was Syrian and a taxi driver and his mother a British nurse, who converted to Islam along with her friend Cat Stevens. Suleyman left the religion at university and describes himself as a “staunch atheist”. His mother is no longer a Muslim.

He was also honest about his mental struggles on the Leading podcast with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart. “I’m very driven and have a lot of energy but also, you know, I’m constantly wrestling with demons and darkness and [a] difficult childhood and difficult memories.”

When Campbell asked whether his father thought he was going to hell for turning his back on the faith, he replied: “I think my dad probably does, which is a funny, funny thought.” His parents are “non-plussed” by his success, he said, but he has “bought them houses and all the rest of it”. Suleyman also appears to be an eligible bachelor, last year saying he was “very much single”.

The political scientist Ian Bremmer, who has been a co-author with Suleyman, describes him as one of the “top minds” on AI, a “man of pretty strong opinions” but “open to good analytic debate”. “He pushes himself pretty hard … this is not a guy who mails it in, this is not a guy who leaves things to his office, or his chief of staff or researchers, he gets the work done himself,” Bremmer said.

That drive extends to his leisure pursuits. Bremmer described how Suleyman came round to his house to play tennis. “He didn’t really know how to play tennis … even though he wasn’t any good the first time… as a consequence he went out and took some lessons and in short order became a pretty serviceable tennis player.”

Despite this intensity, Bremmer said Suleyman was quick witted and good company, albeit with terrible dress sense. “He had a book party in New York and I swear to God he was wearing something that looked like a garbage bag. And I gave him enormous shit about it,” he joked.