microsoft has hired Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. In a post on XSuleyman announced that he will join Microsoft as CEO of a new team that manages the company's consumer-facing artificial intelligence products, including Copilot, Bing and Edge.
Suleyman will also serve as executive vice president of Microsoft ai and will join the company's senior leadership team reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Suleyman co-founded the artificial intelligence lab DeepMind in 2010, which was later acquired by Google in 2014.
DeepMind remains a pioneering force in ai within Google. However, Suleyman has not been part of the division for many years. He was placed on leave in 2019 over controversy surrounding some of the projects he directed, according to ai-lab”>a report of Bloomberg. The Wall Street Journal It was later reported that Google and DeepMind opened an investigation into Suleyman over complaints that he bullied staff.
After being placed on leave at DeepMind, Google announced that it had hired Suleyman as vice president of ai product and policy management. Suleyman left Google in 2022 to co-found the startup Inflection ai.
In addition to hiring Suleyman, Microsoft will also bring on some of Inflection ai's employees, including co-founder Karén Simonyan, who will serve as chief scientist of the consumer ai group. Kevin Scott will remain chief technology officer and executive vice president of ai at Microsoft.
“I have known Mustafa for several years and greatly admire him as the founder of DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product creator, and builder of pioneering teams pursuing bold missions,” Nadella says in a memo to employees. published by Microsoft. “We have a real opportunity to develop technology once thought impossible that lives up to our mission of ensuring that the benefits of ai reach every person and organization on the planet, safely and responsibly.”
Microsoft has invested billions in its partnership with OpenAI and recently struck a deal with ai startup Mistral. The formation of a new ai team does not mean that Microsoft has forgotten about these partnerships. Microsoft says it will “continue to build ai infrastructure including custom systems and silicon work in support of OpenAI's core model roadmap,” as well as “build products on top of its core models.”
Update March 19 at 1:38 pm ET: Added context about Suleyman's time at DeepMind.
