Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Inflection AI and co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, had some strong words for Elon Musk during a post-event interview with the BBC after the recent United Kingdom artificial intelligence (AI) summit concluded on Nov. 2.
As Cointelegraph reported, Musk leaned in to his penchant for sensational commentary during an interview with U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak at the close of the two day event.
During the conversation, Musk remarked that AI was like “a magic genie,” before warning “usually those stories don’t end well.”
The sometimes richest man in the world also warned that AI would eventually do virtually every job, something he apparently believes will cause humans to struggle to find purpose for their lives.
Musk also discussed the existential dangers that he believes AI presents, including the necessity to include a “physical off switch” for AI systems so that we can control the machines.
Sunak for his part, agreed with Musk’s intimation that Hollywood stories concerning AI, such as The Terminator, appeared to be foundation points for the basis of both men’s views on the technology. “All these movies with the same plot fundamentally all end with the person turning it off,” quipped Sunak.
It’s unclear what technology the two men were referring to. Most AI systems created in the past decade would ostensibly be resistant to attempts at “turning it off” via a single physical switch due to the nature of distributed and cloud computing and server technologies.
Suleyman, who was also in attendance at the U.K. AI Summit, later dismissed Musk’s commentary as pedestrian during an interview with the BBC’s Question Time.
Per the interview, Suleyman asserted that:
“This is why we need an impartial, independent assessment of the trajectory of this technology. [Elon Musk is] not an AI scientist. He owns a small AI company. He has many other companies. His expertise is more in space and cars.”
Suleyman isn’t the first AI expert or CEO to question Musk’s grasp on AI at the scientific level. In 2022 NYU computer science professor and best-selling author Gary Marcus and Vivek Wadha, a distinguished fellow at both Carnegie Mellon and Harvard, challenged Musk’s assertion that “AGI,” artificial general intelligence, would be realized by 2029.
The two experts offered Musk a wager in the amount of $500,000 which would pay off if AGI was realized before the 2029 deadline. To the best of our knowledge, Musk has yet to acknowledge or respond to the proposed wager.
AGI is a nebulous concept with no agreed-upon benchmarks or measurement standards for achieving. The basic premise of the idea is that, one day, due to currently unknowable technological follow-on effects, AI technology will become capable of performing any task requiring intelligence.
While some so-called experts believe that AGI, or at least sentient AI, may already exist, many other experts working in the field assert that current systems aren’t as intelligent or capable as humans or other animals due to their reliance on training, programming, procedure, and guardrails.
There is “no doubt” the UK “will spend 3% of our GDP on defence” in the next parliament, the defence secretary has said.
John Healey’s comments come ahead of the publication of the government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) on Monday.
This is an assessment of the state of the armed forces, the threats facing the UK, and the military transformation required to meet them.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has previously set out a “clear ambition” to raise defence spending to 3% in the next parliament “subject to economic and fiscal conditions”.
Mr Healey has now told The Times newspaper there is a “certain decade of rising defence spending” to come, adding that this commitment “allows us to plan for the long term. It allows us to deal with the pressures.”
A government source insisted the defence secretary was “expressing an opinion, which is that he has full confidence that the government will be able to deliver on its ambition”, rather than making a new commitment.
The UK currently spends 2.3% of GDP on defence, with Sir Keir announcing plans to increase that to 2.5% by 2027 in February.
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This followed mounting pressure from the White House for European nations to do more to take on responsibility for their own security and the defence of Ukraine.
The 2.3% to 2.5% increase is being paid for by controversial cuts to the international aid budget, but there are big questions over where the funding for a 3% rise would be found, given the tight state of government finances.
While a commitment will help underpin the planning assumptions made in the SDR, there is of course no guarantee a Labour government would still be in power during the next parliament to have to fulfil that pledge.
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From March: How will the UK scale up defence?
A statement from the Ministry of Defence makes it clear that the official government position has not changed in line with the defence secretary’s comments.
The statement reads: “This government has announced the largest sustained increase to defence spending since the end of the Cold War – 2.5% by 2027 and 3% in the next parliament when fiscal and economic conditions allow, including an extra £5bn this financial year.
“The SDR will rightly set the vision for how that uplift will be spent, including new capabilities to put us at the leading edge of innovation in NATO, investment in our people and making defence an engine for growth across the UK – making Britain more secure at home and strong abroad.”
Sir Keir commissioned the review shortly after taking office in July 2024. It is being led by Lord Robertson, a former Labour defence secretary and NATO secretary general.
The Ministry of Defence has already trailed a number of announcements as part of the review, including plans for a new Cyber and Electromagnetic Command and a £1bn battlefield system known as the Digital Targeting Web, which we’re told will “better connect armed forces weapons systems and allow battlefield decisions for targeting enemy threats to be made and executed faster”.
Image: PM Sir Keir Starmer and Defence Secretary John Healey on a nuclear submarine earlier this year. Pic: Crown Copyright 2025
On Saturday, the defence secretary announced a £1.5bn investment to tackle damp, mould and make other improvements to poor quality military housing in a bid to improve recruitment and retention.
Mr Healey pledged to “turn round what has been a national scandal for decades”, with 8,000 military family homes currently unfit for habitation.
He said: “The Strategic Defence Review, in the broad, will recognise that the fact that the world is changing, threats are increasing.
“In this new era of threat, we need a new era for defence and so the Strategic Defence Review will be the vision and direction for the way that we’ve got to strengthen our armed forces to make us more secure at home, stronger abroad, but also learn the lessons from Ukraine as well.
“So an armed forces that can be more capable of innovation more quickly, stronger to deter the threats that we face and always with people at the heart of our forces… which is why the housing commitments that we make through this strategic defence review are so important for the future.”