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DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has a chilling warning for Google, his former employer: The internet as we know it will fundamentally change and "old school" Search will be gone in a decade.

"If I was Google I would be pretty worried because that old school system does not look like it's gonna be where we're at in 10 years time," he said during a recent episode of the No Priors podcast.

Suleyman started DeepMind, a pioneering artificial intelligence company, with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, in 2010. Google bought it in 2014, and the firm went on to develop ground-breaking inventions, including AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict protein structures. Suleyman left Google a couple of years ago and co-founded a startup called Inflection AI, which recently launched its first product, a personalized chatbot called Pi.

In 2019, Suleyman switched from DeepMind to a VP role at Google. The move followed an internal investigation at DeepMind into allegations that Suleyman had bullied staff.Insider reported that complaints over Suleyman's behavior had been raised for several years. He has apologized and has said that he "really screwed up."

During his final period at Google, Suleyman worked onLaMDA, a large language model. He said he and other colleagues tried to launch a conversational, interactive product using this model, but couldn't persuade Google.

"It wasn't the right timing for Google for various reasons," he said, laughing ruefully. "And I was just like, you know, this has to be out there in the world. This is going to clearly be the new wave of technology."

"The way I positioned LaMDA at Google is that conversation is the future interface. And Google is already a conversation. It's just an appallingly painful one," Suleyman added.

There's a lot for Google to lose if its search engine is forced to change radically. The company is the gatekeeper to the web, crawling, indexing and ranking millions of sites. It makes almost all its profit from running ads alongside search results. It is now experimenting with its own chatbot, Bard, and weaving some of this technology into Search. But no one really knows how it will make as much money from this new format.

With or without Google, the search experience will evolve to be conversational and interactive, Suleyman said on the No Priors podcast. The has huge ramifications for the future of the web and everyone who relies on it to access information and make a living. Here are more highlights from Suleyman's comments:

You say something to Google, it gives you an answer in 10 blue links. You say something about those 10 blue links by clicking on it. It generates that page. You look at that page. You say something to Google by how long you spend on that page, what you click on, how much you scroll up and down, etc, etc. And then you come back to the Search login and you update your query and you say something again to Google about what you saw. That's a dialog, and Google learns like that, and the problem is, it's using 1980s Yellow Pages to have that conversation. And actually now we can do that conversation in fluent natural language.

And I think the problem with what Google has, I guess in a way accidentally, done to the internet is that it has basically shaped content production in a way that optimizes for ads, and everything is now SEO-ed to within an inch of its life. You go on a web page and all the text has been broken out into sub-bullets, and subheaders, and separated by ads, and you spend 5 to 7 or 10 seconds just scrolling through the page to find the snippet that you actually want. Most of the time you are just looking for a quick snippet. And if you are reading, it's just in this awkward format and that's because if you spend 11 seconds on the page, instead of 5 seconds, that looks like high quality content to Google and it's quote-on-quote engaging. So the content creator is incentivized to keep you on that page, and that's bad for us because what we as humans clearly want is high quality succinct fluent, natural language answers to the questions that we want. And then crucially we want to be able to update our response without thinking how do I change my query? We've learned to speak Google. It's a crazy environment. We've learned to Google. That's just a weird lexicon that we've co-developed with Google over 20 years. No. Now, that has to stop. That's over. That moment is done, and we can now talk to computers in fluent natural language and that is the new interface.

We think that in the next few years everyone is going to have their own personal AI. There are going to be many different types of AI. There will be business AIs, government AIs, nonprofit AIs, political AIs, influencer AIs, brand AIs. All of those AIs are going to have their own objective aligned to their owner. Which is to promote something, sell something, persuade you of something. And my belief is that we all as individuals want our own AIs that are aligned to our own interests and on our team and in our corner. And that's what a personal AI is. And ours is called Pi, personal intelligence. It is there to be your companion. We've started off with a style that is empathetic and supportive and we try to ask ourselves at the beginning what makes for good conversation.

I think it's going to change fundamentally. I think that most computing is going to become a conversation. And a lot of that conversation is going to be facilitated by AIs of various kinds. So your Pi is going to give you a summary of the news in the morning. It's going to help you keep learning about your favorite hobby, whether it's cacti or motorcycles. Every couple of days it's going to send you new updates, new information in a summary snippet that really suits exactly your reading style and your interests and your preference for consuming information. Whereas a website, the traditional open internet just assumes there's a fixed format and that everybody wants a single format. And generative AI clearly shows us that we can make this dynamic and emergent and entirely personalized. If I was Google I would be pretty worried because that old school system does not look like it's gonna be where we're at in 10 years time. It's not going to happen overnight. There's going to be a transition but these kinds of succinct, dynamic personalized interactive moments are clearly the future.

An AI is kind of just a website or an app. Let's say you have a blog about baking. You can still produce super high quality content with your AI and your AI will be a lot more engaging and interactive for other people to talk to. So to me, any brand is already kind of an AI. It's just using static tools. For a couple of hundred years, the ad industry has been using color, shape, texture, text, sound and image to generate meaning. It's just they release a new version every six months or every year. Now, that's going to become much more dynamic, and interactive. So I really don't subscribe to this view that there's going to be 1 or 5 AIs. I think this is completely misguided and fundamentally wrong. There are going to be 100s of millions of AIs or billions of AIs. And there will be a line to individuals. So what we don't want is autonomous AIs that operate completely independently and wander off doing their own thing. That doesn't end well. If your blogger has their own AI that represents their content, then I imagine a world where my Pi will go out and talk to that AI and say yeah my Mustafa is super interested to learn about baking, he can't crack an egg, so where does he need to start? And then Pi will have an interaction and be like oh that was really kind of funny and interesting. Mustafa will really like that. And then Pi will come back to me and be like hey I found this great AI today. Maybe we could set up a conversation, you'll find something super interesting. Or they recorded this little clip of me and the other AI interacting and here's a 3 minute video, or something like that. This will be how new content, I think, gets produced. And I think it will be your AI, your Pi, your personal AI that acts as interlocutor accessing the other world. Which is basically, by the way, what Google does at the moment. Google crawls other essentially AIs that are statically produced by the existing methods and has a little interaction with them, ranks them, and then presents them to you.

Read more here:
DeepMind Cofounder: Old-School Google Search Will Be Gone in a Decade - Business Insider