Can an AI Become Its Own CEO After Creating a Startup? Google DeepMind Co-Founder Thinks So

Google’s DeepMind division has long led the way on all sorts of AI breakthroughs, grabbing headlines in 2016, when one of its systems beat a world champion at the strategy game Go, then seen as an unlikely feat. So when one of DeepMind’s co-founders makes a pronouncement about the future of AI, it’s worth listening, especially if you’re a startup entrepreneur. AI might be coming for your job! 

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now CEO of Inflection AI–a small, California-based machine intelligence company–recently suggested this possibility could be reality in a half-decade or so. At the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos this week, Suleyman said he thinks AI tech will soon reach the point where it could dream up a company, project-manage it, and successfully sell products. This still-imaginary AI-ntrepreneur will certainly be able to do so by 2030. He’s also sure that these AI powers will be “widely available” for “very cheap” prices, potentially even as open-source systems, meaning some aspects of these super smart AIs would be free. 

Whether an AI entrepreneur could actually beat a human at the startup game is something we’ll have to wait to find out, but the mere fact that Suleyman is saying an AI could carry out the role is stunning. It’s also controversial, and likely tangled in a forest of thorny legal matters. For example, there’s the tricky issue of whether an AI can own or patent intellectual property. A recent ruling in the U.K. argues that an AI definitively cannot be a patent holder. 

Underlining how much of all of this is theoretical, Suleyman’s musings about AI entrepreneurs came from an answer to a question about whether AIs can pass the famous Turing test. This is sometimes considered a gold standard for AI: If a real artificial general intelligence (AGI) can fool a human into thinking that it too is a human. Cunningly, Suleyman twisted the question around, and said the traditional Turing test wasn’t good enough. Instead, he argued a better test would be to see if an AGI could perform sophisticated tasks like acting as an entrepreneur. 

No matter how theoretical Suleyman’s thinking is, it will unsettle critics who worry about the destructive potential of AI, and it may worry some in the venture capital world, too. How exactly would one invest in a startup with a founder that’s just a pile of silicon chips? Even Suleyman said he thinks that this sort of innovation would cause a giant economic upset. 

The potential for disruption also chimes with news that game companies, surveyed by the Game Developers Conference, are genuinely worried about AI taking over some of their work–particularly roles with a more creative bent, such as art, narrative, and quality assurance. Google’s recent round of layoffs also reflects the kind of disruption AI can cause. Similarly, PwC’s annual CEO survey shows some leaders think generative AI will lead to a 5 percent workforce cut around the world this year. If AI is coming for, say, members of your small startup’s PR team in 2024, whose job will it be capable of doing by 2030?

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg also discussed smart AGIs this week. Talking to journalist Alex Heath at The Verge about AI’s future, he said that Meta’s leadership has come to think that “in order to build the products that we want to build, we need to build for general intelligence.” Zuckerberg also spoke on the idea of creating open-source AGI systems, supporting some of Suleyman’s thinking.

This topic is, of course, still in the realm of possibility and can still be discussed partly as a philosophical matter. For now, serial small-business entrepreneurs can probably relax: The AIs are not coming for your jobs yet. Most likely.

Even Suleyman’s framing of the idea was couched in terms of a psychological/engineering problem–the Turing test. The notion that AGIs will soon be able to act as entrepreneurs is of course a thorny matter, and it comes with some serious potential legal entanglements. 

Even if an AGI could dream up a company and had the right skills to project-manage it, the legal framework for this to actually happen probably doesn’t exist. Any such company would also likely need some human employees, or at least co-founders.