Microsoft hires DeepMind cofounder to lead its new consumer AI division

Microsoft now has a single leader in control of consumer AI for the first time. DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman joins the company from rival Inflection AI. Suleyman will try to appeal to the consumer Assistant copilot it prepares for the future, for what may be for a long time Battle with Google For AI dominance among Silicon Valley’s Big Five companies.

Suleiman’s official title will be executive vice president and CEO of the new division, Microsoft AI, and will report directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Joining him will be a companion Bending AI co-founder Karen Simonyan is named chief scientist.

“Fuzzy” might be one way to describe Microsoft’s Copilot. Despite a quick jump from the starting blocks to take the lead over Google, Bloomberg informed In January, Bing’s market share barely moved the needle against its search rival. In addition, a Microsoft engineer raised flags About OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Copilot’s security earlier this year is taking his case to the FTC. Complicating matters further, Google’s AI efforts could reportedly be a big boost. It’s in talks with Apple to bolster the iPhone maker’s generative AI tools.

Suleiman, who announced that he was moving to Microsoft placed At X (Twitter), “some of our amazing teammates” from Inflection AI will join him and Simonyan at Microsoft AI. But that may be an understatement. Bloomberg informed Microsoft is instead “hiring most employees from AI startup Inflection,” Microsoft said on Tuesday. One blog post Announcing the changes, Inflection said it plans to “lean into our AI studio business” in a way that’s clearly enterprise and away from the consumer-facing Pi chatbot.

Suleiman founded DeepMind in 2010, four years before Google bought the British-American AI startup for a reported sum of between $400 million and $650 million. Suleiman left DeepMind to join Google in 2019, and three years later he Left to create the Inflection AI.

“I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have great admiration for him as the founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, a visionary, product developer, and builder of pioneering teams pursuing bold missions,” Nadella said. he wrote In a Microsoft blog post. The CEO described the incoming Inflection expatriates as “some of the world’s most accomplished AI engineers, researchers and builders.”

Nadella emphasized this Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI is still a top priority. The The maker of ChatGPT Introduces basic generative AI models for Copilot. “Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI,” he said. “We will continue to build AI infrastructure, including custom systems and silicon work, to support OpenAI’s foundational model roadmap, as well as to innovate and build products on top of their foundational models.”