- DeepMind cofounder forecasts AI with entrepreneurial skills like marketing and selling products within 5 years.
- Suleyman sees functionally intelligent AI emerging before 2030 from affordable, widespread tech.
- He urges focusing less on human equivalence than capabilities enabling societal transformation.
AI business capabilities
Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of Google’s AI powerhouse DeepMind, foresees AI demonstrating advanced business capabilities within a half-decade.
When asked at the World Economic Forum about the timeline for AI attaining human-like cognition, Suleyman proposed a modern “Turing test” – assessing if AI can act as an entrepreneurial inventor, marketing and profitably selling products.
Suleyman’s forecasts
Remarkably, he predicts such functionally intelligent AI will emerge in the next five years, before 2030, powered by widely and cheaply available technologies.
“That completely changes the economy,” Suleyman commented.
The AI leader has made other sweeping forecasts around AI’s imminent societal impacts amidst rapid advancements.
He told CNBC this week he sees AI as fundamentally replacing human labor long-term, while last fall predicting ubiquitous, productivity-enhancing AI assistants in five years.
AI’s societal impact
Suleyman also downplayed the relevance of mimicking human cognition, urging focus instead on tangible capabilities like planning, communication, and reasoning.
With AI progress accelerating, questions around equivalence to human intelligence give way to profound real-world change.
