Sam Altman ‘courageous’, Musk is ‘bulldozer’: Microsoft AI chief on key tech leaders

On Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman called the Google Deepmind CEO a great scientist and revealed that they are in regular contact.

Mustafa Suleyman | Microsoft AI chief | AI scraping

Mustafa Suleyman was recently appointed as the CEO of Microsoft's new AI division. (Image Source: Reuters/File photo)

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI chief, has said that he is in constant touch with some of his peers in the industry, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.

The British AI/ML pioneer described Sam Altman as “courageous” while speaking about the current crop of AI leaders in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg. “He [Altman] may well turn out to be one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation. He’s certainly achieved a lot. He’s building data centers at a faster rate than anyone in the industry, and if he can pull it off, it will be pretty dramatic,” Suleyman was quoted as saying.

Suleyman’s praise for Altman comes months after the ChatGPT maker completed a for-profit restructuring and revamped its partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI is currently involved in multiple projects, including the $500 billion Stargate Project, to aggressively build out multiple data centre facilities to handle the massive amount of computing power needed to run ChatGPT and other AI models/tools.

On Demis Hassabis, Suleyman called the Google Deepmind CEO a great scientist. “I think he’s a great thinker and he’s a good polymath. He’s made massive contributions in the field, multiple times. He’s truly exceptional,” he said.

Both AI researchers worked together as cofounders of DeepMind, after which Suleyman co-founded Inflection AI before joining Microsoft to head its AI division in 2024. In the interview, Suleyman revealed that he remains good friends with Hassabis and stay in touch regularly. He even texted Hassabis recently to congratulate him on Nano Banana, Gemini 3 and AlphaFold, as per Bloomberg.

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Elon Musk, who is a founding member of OpenAI but has since fallen out with Altman and is pursuing AI through his startup xAI, is a “bulldozer”, according to Suleyman.

“He’s kind of got superhuman capabilities to bend reality to his will and has, you know, a pretty incredible track record. And somehow he sort of mostly manages to pull off what appears to be impossible,” he was quoted as saying. “I kind of like that he speaks his mind. He’s very unfiltered,” he added.

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Who is Mustafa Suleyman?

Suleyman is the son of a Syrian-born taxi-driver father and an English nurse, who grew up in the London Borough of Islington, according to Wired. He went to Oxford to learn philosophy and theology but dropped out of university in his second year and started the Muslim Youth Helpline, a UK charity that provides free and confidential faith and culturally sensitive support services targeted at vulnerable young people.

Also Read | Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman is against the idea of ‘conscious AI’; here’s why

DeepMind was founded in 2010 and Suleyman was one of the co-founders as well as the head of applied AI. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 and after that, he was also responsible for integrating AI technology across Google products and enabling clear communication between the top engineers. Suleyman left Google in 2022 and founded Inflection AI, which developed the popular AI chatbot Pi.

Last year, Microsoft named Suleyman as the head of its AI division. He reports directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.