Mustafa Suleyman

Mustafa Suleyman CBE (born August 1984) is a British entrepreneur, activist and, most notably, the co-founder and Head of Applied AI at DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company acquired by Alphabet.

Suleyman's father was a Syrian-born taxi driver and his mother was an English nurse in the NHS.

He grew up off Caledonian Road in the London Borough of Islington, where he lived with his parents and his two younger brothers.

Suleyman went to Thornhill Primary School (a state school in Islington) followed by Queen Elizabeth boys school in Barnet. Around that time, he met his DeepMind co-founder, Demis Hassabis, through his best friend, Demis's younger brother. Suleyman said that he and Hassabis would discuss ways to make the world a better place: "Demis and I had conversations about how to impact the world, and he'd argue that we need to build these grand simulations that one day will model all the complex dynamics of our financial systems and solve our toughest social problems. I'd say we have to engage with the real world today."

At 19, Suleyman dropped out of Mansfield College, Oxford to help start the Muslim Youth Helpline, a telephone counselling service. The organisation became one of the largest mental health support services of its kind in the UK.

Suleyman subsequently worked as a policy officer on human rights for the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone before going on to start Reos Partners, a ‘systemic change’ consultancy that uses methods from conflict resolution to navigate social problems. As a negotiator and facilitator, Mustafa worked for a wide range of clients such as the UN, the Dutch Government, and WWF.

Suleyman co-founded DeepMind Technologies, a leading AI company and became its Chief Product Officer. DeepMind was bought by Google in 2014 and he became Head of Applied AI at DeepMind.

On 21st of August, Bloomberg reported that Mustafa has been placed on administrative leave because of controversy related to some of the projects he led.Mustafa led the development of Streams and the relationship with Royal Free Hospital which was widely criticized and received censure from the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

In December 2019, Suleyman announced he would be leaving DeepMind to join Google, working in a policy role.

Suleyman is one of the three co-founders of Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning company DeepMind Technologies, and started out as its Chief Product Officer. The company quickly established itself as one of the leaders in the AI sector and was backed by Founders Fund, Elon Musk, and Scott Banister amongst others.

In 2014 DeepMind was acquired by Google for a reported £400 million — the company's largest acquisition in Europe to date. Following the acquisition, Suleyman became Head of Applied AI at DeepMind, taking on responsibility for integrating the company's technology across a wide range of Google products.

In February 2016 Suleyman launched DeepMind Health at the Royal Society of Medicine. DeepMind Health builds clinician-led technology for the NHS and other partners improve frontline healthcare services. One the company's first projects, Streams, is a secure mobile app that helps doctors and nurses give faster urgent care to patients showing signs of deterioration by giving them the right information more quickly.

Under Suleyman, DeepMind has also partnered with healthcare organisations in the United Kingdom on research collaborations, including Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre to apply machine learning algorithms to issues like eye disease, head and neck cancer and mammography.

To oversee DeepMind Health, Suleyman asked a number of respected figures to act in the public interest as Independent Reviewers of their activities. These nine individuals meet throughout the year to scrutinise the work of DeepMind Health, and publish their findings in an Annual Report.

In 2017, the Information Commissioner (ICO) concluded a year-long investigation that focused on how the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust tested the app, Streams, in late 2015 and 2016. The ICO found that the Royal Free failed to comply with the Data Protection Act when it provided patient details to DeepMind, and found several shortcomings in how the data was handled, including that patients were not adequately informed that their data would be used as part of the test. DeepMind published its thoughts on the investigation in July 2017, saying “we need to do better” and highlighting several activities and initiatives they were doing for transparency, oversight and engagement. This included developing a patient and public involvement strategy and being transparent in its partnerships.

In 2016, Suleyman led an effort to apply DeepMind's machine learning algorithms to help reduce the energy required to cool Google's data centres. The system evaluated the billions of possible combinations of actions that the data centre operators could take, and came up with recommendations based on the predicted Power Usage Effectiveness. The system discovered novel methods of cooling, leading to a reduction of up to 40% of the amount of energy used for cooling, and a 15% improvement in the building's overall energy efficiency.

Suleyman is prominent in the debate over the ethics of AI and has spoken widely about the need for companies, governments and civil society to join in holding technologists accountable for the impacts of their work. He has advocated for redesigning incentives in the technology industry to steer business leaders toward prioritizing social responsibility alongside fiduciary duties. Within DeepMind he set up a research unit called DeepMind Ethics & Society to study the real-world impacts of AI and help technologists put ethics into practice.

Suleyman is also a founding co-chair of the Partnership on AI – an organisation that includes representatives from companies such as Amazon, Apple, DeepMind, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. The organisation studies and formulates best practices on AI technologies, advances the public's understanding of AI, and serves as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and how it affects people and society. Its Board of Directors has equal representation from non-profit and for profit entities.