From his earliest days as a schoolyard entrepreneur, Mustafa Suleyman has sought to marry his entrepreneurial work to his socially conscious ambitions, and has succeeded spectacularly at every turn.

Although a late convert to the world of computer science, he is now one of the leading figures in the artificial intelligence industry and one of the most important voices calling for an ethically responsible approach to developing new technologies. As a pioneer who has the ear of the biggest technology companies on the planet he is uniquely well placed to guide the future of AI - and there are few people better qualified to do so.  

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The youthful altruist

Mustafa was born in 1984 in London, England; his father was a Syrian immigrant who only spoke broken English and drove a taxi, while his mother was an English nurse. Despite his humble circumstances, Mustafa quickly began to distinguish himself with the characteristics that would define his latter career; entrepreneurship, academic brilliance and social activism.

The entrepreneurial spirit was the first to emerge when Mustafa began buying candy wholesale and then selling it to his fellow students at a substantial profit, but while successful, this somewhat mercenary pursuit did not seem to satisfy his altruistic ambitions. His next undertaking was more socially conscious; he borrowed a wheelchair and toured London’s attractions and public spaces to assess their accessibility for disabled users and then published the results in an 80-page tourist guide. 

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Meanwhile, his academic skills were leading him on a path to Mansfield College at Oxford University to study philosophy, a subject which he believes taught him the fundamentals of systematic thinking that enabled much of his later work. He didn’t seem to require much tuition to acquire these fundamentals, however, as he dropped out of Mansfield aged just 19, and instead joined up with his friend Mohammed Mamdani to create the Muslim Youth Helpline, a telephone counselling service that would go on to become one of the largest mental health support services in the UK.

Having succeeded in this role, the ever-mercurial Suleyman quickly pivoted once again, taking on a role as a policy adviser to the Mayor of London on human rights issues, and then parlayed that experience into his own consultancy firm, Reos Partners, that seeks to tackle social issues by using techniques inspired by conflict resolution techniques. In this role he worked as a consultant for organizations as diverse as the UN and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and it was in this capacity that he discovered the emerging technology that would shape his future. 
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Changing the game

In 2009, Mustafa was in Copenhagen at the UN Climate Change Conference, trying to negotiate emission reduction pledges with global leaders. The eventual failure of these negotiations led him to question the efficacy of the work he and his fellow campaigners were doing. At the same time, he was monitoring the rise of social media companies such as Facebook, and marveling at their ability to corral enormous numbers of people in a common goal. Mustafa recognized that new technology was enabling change at a far larger scale than the campaigns he was working on, and he resolved to pivot once more to identify ways to harness these new technologies.

This led him to his future partners, Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, who were both studying for PhDs in computational neuroscience at University College London. They introduced Mustafa to the latest developments in artificial intelligence, and the following summer the three founded DeepMind, which quickly established itself as one of the leaders in the burgeoning AI field.

DeepMind is perhaps most famous in popular culture for its achievements in one of the most hotly contested areas of artificial intelligence, the world of board games such as Chess and Go. Their first notable victory in this field came with AlphaGo, which became the first piece of software to defeat a human opponent at Go in 2015.

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AlphaZero

This was followed by AlphaZero, which performed an equally remarkable feat in Chess, a game that had already seen artificial intelligences defeat humans 20 years earlier when IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated World Champion Garry Kasparov.

Chess algorithms had developed enormously in the intervening period, using advanced computational techniques that exploited the rapidly improving processor speeds of modern computing, but these algorithms only computed, they did not learn. AlphaZero used state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to develop its understanding of chess, rather than the brute computational force favored by existing algorithms, and the results were spectacular.

In 2018, AlphaZero destroyed the best available algorithm of the time, called Stockfish, in a 100-game match, winning 28 boards and drawing the remaining 72, with no losses. AlphaZero’s victory wasn’t just total, it changed the way humans played chess, with top Grandmasters rapidly shifting their midgame strategies to emulate the revolutionary new tactics that had been deployed by the AI. 

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Ethical intelligence

These successes raised DeepMind’s stock in the artificial intelligence community to even greater heights, but for the socially conscious Suleyman they also increased his ability to speak out on the need for ethical responsibility within the field.

In a 2017 article for the Financial Times, Mustafa challenged his peers to address three crucial problems. First, he highlighted “the disconnect between people who develop technologies and the communities who use them”, highlighting Silicon Valley’s hiring policies that discriminated on gender, race and class, and warning of the negative impact this will have on AI’s efficacy. Second, he called for a solution to the “asymmetry of information regarding how technology actually works”, to ensure misinformation and scaremongering were kept to a minimum, and finally he called out the “structural imbalance of incentives”, where firms were lauded for their financial achievements above all else. 

Financial success is clearly secondary for Mustafa, who from his earliest days as a candy entrepreneur on the school playground has sought to do more than merely make a profit. He has now left DeepMind but is still a prominent figure in the industry, and uses his voice in a wide variety of ways to promote ethical development of the technologies he helped to pioneer. These include Partnership on AI, a non-profit that works directly with major industry players such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon to define and promote best practices for the industry.

Given the incredible potential of artificial intelligence to change our lives in the future, the vigilance and guidance of this True Superhero is an essential corrective that will hopefully ensure those changes serve to benefit all, and not just a select few.