My review of The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

In the mid-2010s, the AI breakthroughs from a small research lab called DeepMind started rippling outward from its London headquarters and attracting global attention. Its pioneering work on programs like AlphaGo and AlphaZero, which had taught themselves how to play Go, chess, and classic Atari video-games, were a big part of what made me start realizing how truly transformative AI was on the verge of becoming.?

So when DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman (who left DeepMind in 2019) asked me if I'd be interested in co-founding a new AI company, I had to jump in. Together, Mustafa, myself, and Karén Simonyan , who'd play a key technical role in some of DeepMind's most notable advances, launched Inflection in May 2022.?

For me, joining forces with the co-founder of one of the industry's most significant AI companies to date, and contributing to the incredibly talented team that he and Karen were assembling, was an opportunity I could not pass up. Especially given Inflection AI 's ambitious goal to make interacting with computers far more expressive, intuitive, and deeply human than it had been before. So for the first time since launching LinkedIn in 2003, I took on the role of co-founder.?

Earlier this year we released our first product, an AI model called Pi , which is short for "personal intelligence." Pi functions equally well as a coach, a confidante, a creative partner, or a sounding board. And, in addition to these partnering capabilities, sometimes Pi is just fun.? We deeply believe that it represents a technology so transformative it can fundamentally change the way millions of people will pursue their aspirations and navigate their lives.

As you might expect of co-founders, Mustafa and I are closely aligned in how we perceive AI's potential to create broad-based benefits for humanity. In fact, that's why we partnered on Inflection in the first place. As we'd gotten to know each other over the years through shared projects such as the Google AI Ethics board, we'd recognized our common aspiration to democratize the power of AI.? We shared the vision to build tools that would give individual users new tools and superpowers to express their humanity, amplify their creativity, and generally live their lives in more self-directed and productive ways.?

We also share a mutual belief that the best way to advocate for the safest, fairest, most broadly beneficial AI future is to help build that future in a hands-on way – i.e., to create the world that we believe should exist.?

Where our viewpoints diverge somewhat is reflected in books we've both published this year. In Impromptu , which I published in March, I primarily focused on many of the ways I believe AI will positively impact different aspects of human experience, such as education, professional life, journalism, and criminal justice. Because so much news media coverage and broader cultural discourse around new and potentially transformative technologies typically emphasizes fears, uncertainties, and what could possibly go wrong, I believe that it is important to present a more forward-looking vision about what could possibly go right.

In fact, given how negative so much of the discourse around AI has been over the last year, including the ongoing doom and gloom about the existential risks it allegedly poses to jobs, democracy, and even the long-term viability of humanity, I'm already at work on my next book about AI. (Spoiler alert: I'm not an existential risk alarmist.)?

Mustafa, in contrast, has made potential risks and risk mitigation the focus of his new book, The Coming Wave.?

I definitely had some conversations with Mustafa while he was writing this book about how focusing on potential AI risks might do more harm than good. Not everyone was as aware of AI's positive attributes as he was, I suggested. Concentrating so much on risks might cause people to mistakenly panic. There was, I reminded him, already a surfeit of speculation about robot takeovers, human obsolescence, and all the various dystopias that AI might catalyze. Did he have to add to it?

But Mustafa, in his characteristically humanistic way, felt obligated to present the clearest picture of the risks as he saw them, as part of the process of getting to our best possible AI future. And ultimately I'm grateful that he felt like this, because in The Coming Wave, and advocating for a global approach he describes as containment, he's produced the most well-informed and judicious assessment of AI risk that I've read to date.?

Which makes sense, of course, when you consider that for nearly 15 years now, Mustafa's been at the forefront of designing these new tools. He's experienced their complexities, limitations, and unanticipated behaviors in first-hand ways. He's learned from these experiences and continues to iterate on how to make these tools more aligned with human interests.

In homing in on the dynamics informing current patterns of technological development and diffusion, and describing plausible potential harms rather than future sci-fi apocalypse scenarios, The Coming Wave offers a truly valuable alternative to both alarmist doomerism ("The robots are going to destroy us!") and reflexive anti-tech bias ("The only good algorithm is the one we never run!")?

For understanding how bad actors might credibly exploit new AI and synthetic biology capabilities, and our obligation as humans to contain and harness this incredible technology, I can't recommend The Coming Wave highly enough.?

Along with valuing The Coming Wave's clear-eyed assessments and sharp insights, I also believe that it's crucial to envision our possible futures through the widest possible aperture, not solely through the lens of risk aversion.?

And, obviously, as the co-founder of two ground-breaking AI companies, Mustafa understands this too. As Inflection's CEO, he's leading the effort to create a new generation of AI tools that will enable millions of people to tap the power of AI in ways of their own choosing, in pursuit of more fulfilling lives.?

"As a technologist and entrepreneur, I am, by default, an optimist," Mustafa exclaims in The Coming Wave's first chapter. And then, in the book's final chapter, after detailing potential downsides with rigorous clarity for hundreds of pages, he says something that may strike some as fairly dire, but which to my ear perfectly encapsulates Mustafa's essential humanism and hope: "It will require an awesome effort to fundamentally change our societies, human instincts, and the patterns of history. It’s far from certain. It looks impossible. But meeting the great dilemma of the twenty-first century must be possible."??

For Mustafa, then, even containment is an entrepreneurial act. And as much as caution, careful assessment, and even pessimism should inform our efforts, optimism is what ultimately fuels them.