Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has recounted a futuristic lunch conversation from 2015 with Google co-founder Larry Page .
Revealing that the chat took place at a canteen in SpaceX , Suleyman said that Page envisioned exploring distant galaxies using advanced self-propelling probes by the end of the century. Responding to Suleyman’s story, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk echoed the sentiment, stating that Page “might be right” in his bold prediction for human civilization.
Recalling the 2015 encounter, Suleyman said that the company chose Musk as one of the three independent members while having a conversation sitting in the canteen at SpaceX headquarters during the very first meeting of DeepMind’s AI Ethics and Safety Board. When Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, Suleyman and his co-founders, Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, made it an explicit condition of the sale that Google establish an ethics committee featuring independent oversight representation. “Yeah, I remember in 2015 being in the canteen at SpaceX.
Because google had to agree, which was obviously Larry, Sergey, and David Drummond at the time, “One of those independent members,. Because he was like, you know, you’re one of those speciesists,” he recalled, you know, obviously he was suspicious of me as well.
So when we sold DeepMind to Google, we made it a condition of our acquisition that we would have an Ethics and Safety Board with independent representation on the board,” Suleyman said in a podcast The Builders with Walter Isaacson and Kaleidoscope. Google executives: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and then-Chief Legal Officer David Drummond. And we had our first meeting of the Ethics and Safety Board. And then me, Demis, and Shane had to jointly agree who those three independents would be. And so we jointly picked Elon as one of them,” he added. Suleyman noted that he remains unsure whether holding those early AI safety discussions at SpaceX headquarters played any role in influencing Musk’s subsequent founding of OpenAI. “No idea if that had an influence on the founding of OpenAI or not. But so then we had our morning session and we were sitting down for lunch and I was sitting next to Larry.