Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, has issued a stern warning to his former employer Google: The Internet is about to undergo a fundamental change, and old-fashioned search engines will disappear within a decade.
In a recent interview on the No Priors podcast, Suleiman said: “If I were Google, I would be very worried because the old search engine will not exist in ten years.”
In 2010, Suleiman co-founded the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg. In 2014, Google acquired it and backed it to continue developing breakthrough technologies, including AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence model that can predict protein structures.
In 2019, Suleiman transitioned from DeepMind to vice president of Google. This follows DeepMind’s internal investigation into allegations that Suleiman bullied employees, and complaints about his behavior have been made for years. He has since apologized and said he “really screwed up”.
During his last days at Google, Suleiman worked on the development of LaMDA, a large language model. He and other colleagues tried to launch a conversational interaction product that used this model, but failed to convince Google to accept it, he said.
“It wasn’t the right time for Google, for a variety of reasons,” he says with a rueful laugh. “I just thought there was going to be a conversational interactive product, and that was obviously going to lead to a new wave of technology.”
Suleiman added: “I think conversations are the interface of the future, and Google has adopted conversations, it’s just that the conversation experience is unbearable.”
After leaving Google, Suleiman and others co-founded a startup called Inflect AI. The company recently launched its first product — Pi, a personalized chatbot.
If Google’s search engine is forced to make fundamental changes, it will lose a lot. As the “gatekeeper of the web,” Google crawls, indexes, and ranks countless sites. Nearly all of Google’s profits come from placing ads next to search results. Now, the company is testing its own chatbot, Bard, and applying some of its technology to search. But no one really knows how Google will make money from this new business model.
Suleiman said on the No Priors podcast that with or without Google, the search experience will evolve into a conversational and interactive form, which will have a huge impact on the future of the web and everyone who depends on it for information and for a living. Here are some more highlights from Suleiman’s comments:
“The Yellow Pages of the 80s”
When you search on Google, it shows 10 blue links that you can click to find the answer. This is the page that Google Search generates, and when you browse it, it tells Google how long you spent on it, which links you clicked, how much content you viewed, and more.
Then, you need to go back to the search login page, re-enter the query content, and repeat the above query process again. This is a conversation, and Google learns by repeating this process. However, it uses the Yellow Pages conversations of the 1980s, whereas we are now fluent in natural language.
“Search Engine Optimization at its best”
I think what Google has done on the Internet may have been inadvertent, but it has actually changed the way content is produced to optimize advertising. All content is now optimized to the extreme for SEO compliance. The text on the web page is broken up into small chunks and subheadings, and the ads are breaking them up, so it takes us 5 to 7 or 10 seconds to find the information we want, and most of the time we just want to understand a small piece of information.
And when we need to read, the content is usually presented in an awkward format because if you stay on the page for 11 seconds, not 5 seconds, then Google thinks this is high-quality, engaging content. So content creators are incentivized to keep you on the page, which is bad for us because we, as humans, need quality, concise, fluent, natural language answers to our questions.
More importantly, we want to be able to update our answers without having to think about how to change our query. We’ve learned “Google language,” a strange vocabulary we’ve co-developed with Google for 20 years. Now, this must stop. This era is over, we can now communicate with computers in fluent, natural language, which is the new search interface.
“Everyone will have their own AI”
We believe that in the next few years, everyone will have their own personal AI. These AIs will include business AI, government AI, non-profit AI, political AI, influencer AI, and brand AI.
Each AI will have its own goals, aligned with the master’s goals. We believe that, as individuals, we all want our AI to align with our interests. This is what it means to have a personal artificial intelligence, let’s call it Pi, which will be your companion. We started out with an empathetic and supportive style and tried to ask ourselves what makes a good conversation.
What has changed in the structure of the Internet?
I think that in the future, the Internet will change fundamentally, and most computing will be in the form of conversation, and a large part of this conversation will be facilitated by artificial intelligence of various types. For example, Pi can give you a news digest in the morning. It will constantly learn what you like, whether it’s a cactus or a motorcycle. Every few days, it sends you new updates, offering new information in digest form, and it’s very much tailored to your reading style, interests, and preferences for consuming information.
Both traditional websites and the open Internet default to a fixed format, and they assume that everyone needs the same format. Generative AI shows us clearly that we can make everything dynamic and fully personal. If I were Google, I’d be very worried because the old-fashioned search engine won’t exist in ten years. This won’t happen overnight, there will be a transition period, but these clean, dynamic, personalized interactions clearly represent the future.
Advice for content creators
In my opinion, artificial intelligence is essentially just a website or application. For example, if you have a blog about baking, you can use artificial intelligence to produce high-quality content to make your blog more engaging and interactive. So, to me, any brand can be considered a kind of artificial intelligence, just using static tools.
The advertising industry has been using color, shape, texture, text, sound and imagery to produce meaningful content for hundreds of years, they just release new versions every six months or every year. Today, it will all be more dynamic and interactive. So I really disagree with the idea that there are only 1 to 5 AIs. I think this is completely misguided and simply wrong. In reality, there will be hundreds of millions or billions of AIs. What we don’t want are autonomous AIs that operate entirely on their own, that aimlessly do their own thing, and that doesn’t produce good results.
If bloggers had their own AI to produce content, I could imagine a world where my Pi would communicate with other AIs, say, “Suleiman is very interested in learning to bake, but he won’t Crack the eggs, so where should he start?” Then, there will be an interaction between the artificial intelligences. When the Pi comes back to me, it says, “Hey, I found a cool AI today.”
Maybe we can chat and you’ll find a lot of super interesting things. They might record short videos of me interacting with another AI, or something like that. In my opinion, this will be the new way of generating content. In my opinion, your personal artificial intelligence will act as an interlocutor into another world. By the way, this is basically what Google is doing right now. Google crawls other AIs that are traditionally statically generated, does some interaction with them, ranks them, and presents them to you.
