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Mustafa Suleyman is a British tech entrepreneur based in Palo Alto, known for cofounding DeepMind and Inflection AI, where he is currently CEO. Mustafa is also a venture partner at VC firm Greylock, advising early-stage companies and investing. Mustafa worked at DeepMind for almost ten years before joining Google as VP of AI Products and AI Policy. In early 2022, he left Google to join Greylock and start Inflection AI. Mustafa has been recognized for his accomplishments in both the US and UK. In 2019, he received the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his contributions to the UK technology sector and accepted the Silicon Valley Visionary Award. Mustafa wrote the book The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma with Michael Bhaskar. The book was released in September 2023.
Mustafa Suleyman was born in London in 1984. Mustafa grew up in North London with his parents and two younger brothers. His father was a Syrian-born taxi driver and his mother was an English nurse in the NHS. He attended Thornhill Primary School in Islington and Queen Elizabeth School for boys in Barnet. At eleven years old, Mustafa began buying candy wholesale and selling it to other students at Queen Elizabeth's School for a profit until teachers shut it down. He later won a Young Enterprise award for borrowing a hospital wheelchair and creating an eighty-page guide to London attractions and public spaces assessing their accessibility for disabled users. Growing up, Mustafa was best friends with Demis Hassabis's younger brother.
Mustafa won a place at Mansfield College, Oxford University, reading philosophy and theology. However, he dropped out in his second year at the age of nineteen to start the Muslim Youth Helpline—a telephone counseling service that went on to become one of the largest mental health support services in the UK.
At twenty-two, Mustafa began working for the mayor of London Ken Livingstone, advising on human rights policy. Using this experience, Mustafa started his own consultancy firm called Reos Partners in 2007. The firm sought to tackle social issues using ideas inspired by conflict resolution techniques. Mustafa consulted for organizations including the United Nations and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). In this role, he became aware of emerging technologies and how they could shape the future of society.
Mustafa was introduced to the latest developments in AI by Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, who were both studying for PhDs in computational neuroscience at University College London. The three founded DeepMind in 2010. The company was bought by Google in 2014 for $650 million. During his almost ten years at DeepMind, Mustafa held the position of chief product officer and head of applied AI. He contributed to the company becoming one of the world's leading AI companies, including numerous significant research publications. Mustafa led teams that invented and deployed cutting-edge AI systems across a number of domains.
Mustafa left DeepMind in January 2020 to become VP of AI Product Management & AI Policy at Google.
In early 2022, Mustafa cofounded Inflection AI, an AI-first consumer products company developing Pi (personal intelligence) described as a "supportive and empathetic conversational AI." Inflection AI was founded alongside Reid Hoffman and Karén Simonyan and incubated at Greylock (where Mustafa is also a venture partner). The company has gone on to release two large language models (Inflection 1 & 2); build an AI cluster, comprising 22,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs; and raise over $1.5 billion.
Mustafa is a senior fellow at The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School working on the geostrategic challenges of future AI systems. He is also a member of the Board at The Economist and a member of the Steering Committee of WEF's AI Governance Alliance.
