28/04/2024
Today's post is dedicated to Mustafa Suleiman because he is the young man about whom Bill Gates once said, "Keep an eye on him because he could become a big name in the world of technology." Now, if Bill Gates said it, we better take a moment to acknowledge him.
In London, Mustafa Suleiman, a Muslim, grew up. His Syrian father came to London in search of a better future, driving taxis to make ends meet, while his mother worked as a nurse. Essentially, he was just an ordinary member of an ordinary family in every respect.
Mustafa's practical life began when, at the age of only nineteen, he teamed up with his friends to start a Muslim youth help line. In reality, the condition of Muslim youth in Britain was akin to the verse by Mirza Ghalib, "Imaan mujhe rokta hai, jo kheenchta hai mujhe kafir." On one hand, they were compelled to assimilate into society, while on the other hand, they had to avoid the dangers of the drug culture and aimlessness. This phone helpline service was there to guide them. It started at a time when incidents of Islamophobia were on the rise, and Muslim youths were feeling more pressure. So, during that time, this service helped Muslim youth break free from social isolation. Today, it has become the largest mental health service for Muslims in Britain.
But for Mustafa Suleiman, who was fundamentally a philosopher and an excellent manager, this was just the beginning.
An important turning point in his life came in 2009. There was an environmental conference happening in Copenhagen, and Mustafa was one of the organizers. His effort was to get delegates to agree on a common wisdom against deforestation. He was very disheartened when he saw that people couldn't agree on a common strategy.
But from that disappointment emerged a new path.
It was the year 2009, and Facebook was emerging as a major company. Those days Mustafa read somewhere that the number of active users on Facebook had reached one hundred million. That stuck with him.
He felt that if people couldn't come together on a common goal at the Copenhagen conference, on the other hand, millions of people with a single thought on social media could come together in just a few days. That day, Mustafa felt that in the times to come, it would be technology that would bring people together. So, he shifted from the world of philosophy and theories to the field of computers. The next year, he started a company called DeepMind with his friends.
It was an artificial intelligence research firm.
What was the goal of DeepMind? It was to train computers to make better decisions in far less time than humans could. Imagine, the ability to make better decisions in much less time!
Think about it, we have just begun to understand and utilize Artificial Intelligence in 2023, but Mustafa Suleiman and his friends were working on algorithms when very few people in the West were even aware of this field. I heard Mustafa's interview, where he mentioned that at that time, he had to hide his work from people because when they heard about Artificial Intelligence, they would laugh; they thought of it as a foolish dream of science fiction children that couldn't possibly come true.
"DeepMind" was obscure to the general public, but the tech world was watching it closely. Big names like Elon Musk of Tesla and Peter Thiel of PayPal had already started investing in it. Then, in 2014, Google bought DeepMind for $400 million. It was the biggest and most expensive acquisition by Google outside America at that time.
The successes of DeepMind could be the topic of a separate post; for now, I'll give a relatively simple reference. Google has data centers all over the world that require a tremendous amount of electricity to keep cool. Mustafa was tasked with finding a solution to this problem. He devoted himself to finding the best solution for DeepMind's algorithms. These solutions are actually a combination of many decisions. Finding the perfect combination that yields the best results is a very time-consuming task. Let's take an example from biryani. Everyone knows about the fifteen to twenty different spices used in it, but still, there are only a few shops where the taste is just right. The reason is that they have found the perfect combination of spices and the best time to put them in.
So, the project that saves electricity in Google's data centers might not have found the best and ideal solution even in ten years if given to someone else. DeepMind didn't just focus on hundreds or thousands, but after scrutinizing millions or even billions of combinations, it proposed the best solution, reducing electricity usage in Google's data centers by forty percent. Mustafa wants to use the same solution in buildings around the world to reduce energy consumption and environmental pollution.
This is why Mustafa Suleiman became a part of Microsoft last month. Microsoft has given him full charge of their Artificial Intelligence division.
Now, as Microsoft's A.I. Chief Executive, he has the vast world to conquer and an unlimited sky to fly. Let's see how high he takes the A.I. industry.
In a tech world where Muslims are very few, if a genius, a talented person steps forward and reaches such heights, we should not only be happy for him but also find motivation for ourselves.
Today, we need such heroes.
