“We will never build a sex robot,” says Mustafa Suleyman

In an ideal world, what kind of chatbot do you want to build? You’ve just launched a bunch of updates to Copilot. How do you get the balance right when you’re building a chatbot that has to compete in a market in which people seem to value humanlike interaction, but you also say you want to avoid seemingly conscious AI?

It’s a good question. With group chat, this will be the first time that a large group of people will be able to speak to an AI at the same time. It really is a way of emphasizing that AIs shouldn’t be drawing you out of the real world. They should be helping you to connect, to bring in your family, your friends, to have community groups, and so on.

That is going to become a very significant differentiator over the next few years. My vision of AI has always been one where an AI is on your team, in your corner.

This is a very simple, obvious statement, but it isn’t about exceeding and replacing humanity—it’s about serving us. That should be the test of technology at every step. Does it actually, you know, deliver on the quest of civilization, which is to make us smarter and happier and more productive and healthier and stuff like that?

So we’re just trying to build features that constantly remind us to ask that question, and remind our users to push us on that issue.

Last time we spoke, you told me that you weren’t interested in making a chatbot that would role-play personalities. That’s not true of the wider industry. Elon Musk’s Grok is selling that kind of flirty experience. OpenAI has said it’s interested in exploring new adult interactions with ChatGPT. There’s a market for that. And yet this is something you’ll just stay clear of?

Yeah, we will never build sex robots. Sad in a way that we have to be so clear about that, but that’s just not our mission as a company. The joy of being at Microsoft is that for 50 years, the company has built, you know, software to empower people, to put people first.

Sometimes, as a result, that means the company moves slower than other startups and is more deliberate and more careful. But I think that’s a feature, not a bug, in this age, when being attentive to potential side effects and longer-term consequences is really important.