Google DeepMind co-founder says AI could run businesses within five years

• AI leader Mustafa Suleiman predicts that this technology will be able to run businesses within the next five years.
• The co-founder of Google’s DeepMind says AI will soon be able to act like entrepreneurs and inventors.
• But the conversation around AGI remains overblown, he said during the 2024 World Economic Forum.

Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of Google’s AI arm DeepMind, says AI will be able to create and run its own businesses within the next five years.

During Thursday’s panel discussion on AI at the 2024 World Economic Forum, the current CEO of Inflection AI was asked how long it would take for AI to pass a Turing-like test. A pass would indicate that the technology has achieved advanced human-like capabilities, which some experts call artificial general intelligence (AGI).

In response, Suleiman said a modern version of the Turing test assesses whether an AI can act like an entrepreneur, a mini-project manager, or an inventor who can market, manufacture, and sell products for profit. said it would be.

He seems to believe that AI will be able to perform these business-savvy functions by 2030, at a lower cost.

“I think within the next five years, certainly by the end of the decade, not just these capabilities, but those capabilities will be very cheap, widely available, and in some cases open source. I am confident,” Suleiman said. Davos, Switzerland. “I think it will completely change the economy.”

The AI ​​leader’s comments are just one of many predictions Suleiman has made about the social impact of AI, as tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT take the world by storm.

Earlier this week, Suleiman told CNBC at Davos that AI will be a tool that “fundamentally replaces labor” in the long term.

In a separate interview with CNBC last September, he predicted that over the next five years everyone will have an AI assistant that will improve their productivity and “know intimately about their personal information.”

“It will help you think rationally about your day, prioritize your time, help you invent and be more creative,” Suleiman told CNBC.

Still, he said at Davos 2024 that the term “intelligence” when referring to AI remains “a fairly unclear and ambiguous concept.” He claims the word is “distracting.”

Instead, he thinks researchers should focus on the actual capabilities of AI, such as whether an AI agent can talk to humans to plan, schedule, and organize.

People should take a step back from the “engineering research-driven, provocative definitions we’ve been using for 20 years to hype up this field” and “now we should actually focus on what these things can do.” Suleiman said.

Suleiman did not immediately respond to a request for further comment through Inflection AI.