Microsoft has appointed Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, to lead their efforts in consumer AI.
Microsoft has appointed DeepMind founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead its newly formed consumer AI unit and hired several employees from its Inflection AI startup to defend its leadership against growing competition from Google.
Suleyman will become CEO of the Microsoft AI unit, the company said Tuesday, bringing under one roof its consumer artificial intelligence efforts, such as the Copilot chatbot and the new Bing browser that uses the technology.
I’m excited to announce that today I’m joining @Microsoft as CEO of Microsoft AI. I’ll be leading all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing and Edge. My friend and longtime collaborator Karén Simonyan will be Chief Scientist, and several of our amazing…— Mustafa Suleyman (@mustafasuleyman) March 19, 2024
Built using technology from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Copilot is a cornerstone of Microsoft’s efforts to monetize its AI work and can write emails, summarize documents and make presentations.
“This infusion of new talent allows us to accelerate our pace once again,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a blog post.
“As part of this transition, Mikhail Parakhin and his entire team, including Copilot, Bing and Edge; and Misha Bilenko and the GenAI team will report to Mustafa,” he said.
It comes as Microsoft has partnered with other startups, including France’s Mistral AI, as its ties to OpenAI have come under increased scrutiny.
Nadella said Tuesday that Microsoft is “very committed” to its OpenAI partnership.
Karen Simonyan, who co-founded Inflection AI with Suleyman and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman, will join as principal investigator.
At the same time, Alphabet’s Google unit is expanding its activities related to artificial intelligence. Bloomberg News reported Monday that Apple is in talks to build Google’s Gemini AI engine into the iPhone.
Inflection AI has emerged as one of the most successful names in the genAI race after raising $1.3 billion in cash and a $4 billion cloud loan from Microsoft and Nvidia last June.
The startup behind chatbot Pi said Tuesday that former Mozilla research and development director Sean White is its new CEO and plans to focus on serving models for commercial customers rather than consumers.
It also added that its Inflection-2.5 is available on Microsoft Azure.
