Mustafa Suleyman, Artificial Intelligence pioneer: People should be healthily afraid of AI
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
BBC presenter Amol Rajan speaks to the British artificial intelligence entrepreneur Mustafa Suleyman, Chief Executive of Microsoft AI.
He believes in the enormous potential of AI to be a force for good in the world, changing how we live and work for the better. He is committed to developing a humanist superintelligence, one that always works to serve people and never vice versa. But he remains clear about what he sees as the risks, issuing a warning that without the right ethical safeguards, AI could grow powerful enough to overwhelm humanity. "As somebody who’s deeply techno-optimistic, I invite people to be also healthily afraid and sceptical," he says.
The son of a London taxi-driver and a nurse, he dropped out of Oxford University and by his mid-twenties had co-founded DeepMind, the pioneering artificial intelligence research lab. By the time it was sold to Google four years later in 2014, it was worth a reported $400 million.
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(Image: Mustafa Suleyman Credit: Stephen Brashear/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.8 | Hello, I'm Amal Rajan, BBC presenter, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service, |
| 0:12.2 | the best conversations coming out of the BBC, people shaping our world from all over the world. |
| 0:18.9 | Today we are spending trillions on war and peanuts on peace. |
| 0:22.5 | Wind power in the United States has been subsidized for 33 years. |
| 0:26.1 | Isn't that enough? |
| 0:27.1 | Solar for 25 years. That's enough. |
| 0:29.5 | I don't have army. |
| 0:31.3 | I don't have missile rockets. |
| 0:33.6 | I have my body. |
| 0:34.5 | I have my voice. |
| 0:35.5 | I love singing and so my goal was always to do better and better at it. |
| 0:39.5 | I was still in an induced coma in hospital when the world was defining me. |
| 0:45.3 | For this interview, I met Mustafa Suleiman, the British artificial intelligence entrepreneur and boss of Microsoft AI. |
| 0:53.5 | You're going to hear why he believes we should all be |
| 0:55.6 | healthily afraid of artificial intelligence and how it must be developed so it can always be |
| 1:01.1 | controlled by humans and not vice versa. The son of a nurse and taxi driver, Mustafa Suleiman, |
| 1:07.4 | was in his mid-20s when he co-founded Deep Mind, a pioneering artificial intelligence |
| 1:12.2 | startup which brought together machine learning, neuroscience, engineering and mathematics. |
| 1:17.6 | Four years later, it was sold to Google, reportedly for $400 million. |
| 1:23.1 | Today, he remains a self-proclaimed techno-optimist, seeing the ongoing potential of AI as a force for good |
| 1:29.3 | in how we live and work. But he is clear-eyed about the risks that this increasingly powerful |
... |
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