Markus Schreiber/AP
- AI leader Mustafa Suleyman predicts the tech will be able to run a business in the next five years.
- AI will soon be able to act like an entrepreneur and inventor, cofounder of Google's DeepMind says.
- Yet, the conversation around AGI remains overblown, he said during the 2024 World Economic Forum.
Mustafa Suleyman, the cofounder of DeepMind, Google's AI division, says that AI will be able to create and run its own business within the next five years.
During a Thursday panel on AI at the 2024 World Economic Forum, the now-CEO of Inflection AI was asked how long it would take for AI to pass an exam akin to the Turing test. Passing would indicate that the technology has achieved advanced, human-like capabilities that some experts call AGI, or artificial general intelligence.
In response, Suleyman said the modern day version of the Turing test would instead be to evaluate whether an AI was capable of acting like an entrepreneur, mini-project manager, and an inventor that could market, manufacture, and sell a product for profit.
He seems to believe that AI will be able to exhibit those business-savvy capabilities before 2030— and inexpensively.
"I'm pretty sure that within the next five years, certainly before the end of the decade, we are going to have not just those capabilities, but those capabilities widely available for very cheap, potentially even in open source," Suleyman said in Davos, Switzerland. "I think that completely changes the economy."
The AI leader's comments are just one of many predictions Suleyman has made about the societal impact of AI as tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT take the world by storm.
Earlier this week, Suleyman told CNBC at Davos that AI is a "fundamentally labor-replacing" tool in the long term.
In a separate interview with CNBC last September, he predicted that everyone in the next five years will have AI assistants that will boost productivity and "intimately know your personal information."
"It will be able to reason over your day, help you prioritize your time, help you invent, be much more creative," Suleyman told CNBC.
Still, he said during the 2024 Davos panel that the term "intelligence" when referring to AI is still a "pretty unclear, hazy concept." He claims the term is a "distraction."
Instead, he believes that researchers should focus on AI's real-life capabilities, such as whether an AI agent can talk to humans and plan, schedule, and organize.
People should step back from the "engineering research-led exciting definition that we've used for 20 years to excite the field" and "actually now focus on what these things can do," Suleyman said.
Suleyman didn't immediately respond to BI's request for further comment via Inflection AI.