Microsoft’s AI chief says only biological beings can have consciousness

microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleiman said only biological beings are capable of consciousness and that developers and researchers should stop pursuing projects that suggest otherwise.

“I don’t think that’s a job that people should be doing,” Suleiman told CNBC in an interview this week at the AfroTech conference in Houston, where he was one of the keynote speakers. “If you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer. I think it’s just the wrong question.”

Suleiman, the head of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence efforts, has been one of the voices at the forefront of the rapidly emerging field against the possibility of seemingly sentient AI or AI services that would lead us to believe that humans could suffer.

In 2023, he co-authored a book, “The Coming Wave,” that explores the risks of AI and other emerging technologies. And in August, Suleiman wrote an essay titled “We must build AI for humans, not to be humans.”

This is a controversial topic, as the AI ​​companion market is rapidly growing, with products from companies such as: Meta And Elon Musk’s xAI. And it’s a complex question as the generative AI market, led by Sam Altman and OpenAI, moves toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can perform intellectual tasks on par with human capabilities.

Altman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in August that AGI “isn’t a very useful term,” and that what’s actually happening is that models are evolving rapidly and we’re going to rely on AGI for “more and more things.”

For Suleiman, it is especially important to draw a sharp contrast between AI becoming smarter and more capable, and its ability to have human emotions.

“When we physically experience pain, we feel very sad and terrible, but AI doesn’t feel sad when it experiences pain,” Suleiman said. “This is a very important distinction. It’s actually just creating a perception, a seeming story of experience and itself and consciousness, but that’s not what you’re actually experiencing. Technically, you know that because you can see what the model is doing.”

In the field of AI, there is a theory called biological naturalism, proposed by philosopher John Searle, that consciousness is dependent on living brain processes.

“The reason we give people rights today is because they are suffering and we don’t want to hurt them. They have pain networks and preferences that include avoiding pain,” Suleiman said. “These models don’t have that. It’s just a simulation.”

Suleiman and his colleagues said the science of detecting consciousness is still in its infancy. He acknowledged that “different organizations have different missions,” and at no point said anyone should be prevented from investigating the issue.

But Suleiman emphasized how strongly he opposes the idea.

“They are unconscious,” he said. “Therefore, it would be foolish to pursue research that investigates that question, because they are not and cannot be.”

Suleiman is on a speaking tour, in part to educate the public about the risks of pursuing AI consciousness.

Prior to the AfroTech conference, he spoke at the Paley International Council Summit in Silicon Valley last week. So Suleiman said Microsoft has no intention of developing a chatbot for erotica, which is contrary to its stance with other companies in the tech industry. Altman announced in October that ChatGPT would allow adult users to engage in erotic conversations, while xAI would offer a risqué animated companion.

“These services can basically be purchased from other companies, so we are making decisions about which places we will not go to,” Suleiman reiterated at Afrotech.

Suleiman joined Microsoft in 2024 after the company paid his startup, Inflection AI, $650 million in a license and acquisition deal. He previously co-founded DeepMind and sold it to: google It was $400 million more than a decade ago.

In a Q&A session at AfroTech, Suleiman said he decided to join Microsoft last year because of the company’s history, stability, and broad technological reach. He was also pursued by CEO Satya Nadella.

“The other thing is that Microsoft needed to be self-sufficient in AI,” he said on stage. “Satya, our CEO, started this mission about 18 months ago to ensure that we had the ability to train our own models end-to-end with all our own data, including pre-training, post-training, inference, and deployment to production, and that was part of bringing my team on board.”

Since 2019, Microsoft has been a major investor and cloud partner in OpenAI, and both companies have leveraged their strengths to build AI businesses at scale. However, OpenAI oracleMicrosoft is increasing its focus on its AI services.

Suleiman’s concerns about consciousness resonate. In October, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 243, requiring chatbots to identify themselves as AI and instruct minors to “take a break” every three hours.

Last week, Microsoft announced new features for its Copilot AI service, including an AI companion called Mico and the ability to use Copilot in group chats with other users. Suleiman said Microsoft is building services that recognize that they are AI.

“Simply put, we are always creating AI that works for humans,” he says.

There’s a lot of room for individuality, he added.

“The knowledge is there and the model is very responsive,” Suleiman said. “It’s up to everyone to try to create an AI personality with the values ​​that they want to see, use, and interact with.”

Suleiman highlighted a feature Microsoft launched last week called Real Talk. This is Copilot’s conversational style, designed to challenge the user’s perspective rather than the sycophant’s.

Suleiman described the reality as brash, calling him the “ultimate contradiction” for accelerating AI development at Microsoft while warning of the dangers of AI in his books, and said he has recently become exasperated by this.

“This was just a magical use case, because in a way it made me feel like I was actually being watched,” Suleiman said, noting that AI itself is full of contradictions.

“It’s overwhelming in a way, but completely magical at the same time,” he said. “And if you’re not afraid of it, you don’t really understand it. You should be afraid of it. Fear is healthy. Skepticism is necessary. We don’t need unbridled accelerationism.”

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