Microsoft is hiring a DeepMind co-founder to lead its new consumer AI division

Microsoft now has a single leader overseeing consumer AI for the first time. Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of DeepMind, joins the company from competitor Inflection AI. Solomon will try to push his consumer-facing co-pilot into the future, preparing for what could be a long battle with Google for AI supremacy among the Big Five in Silicon Valley.

Sulaiman’s official job title will be Executive Vice President and CEO of a new division called Microsoft AI, and he will report directly to CEO Satya Nadella. He will be joined by Karen Simonyan, co-founder of Inflection AI, who will hold the title of chief scientist.

“Chaotic” would be one way to describe Microsoft’s Copilot rollout. Despite its rapid leap from the initial setbacks to occupy the top spot on Google, it… Bloomberg mentioned Last January, Bing’s market share didn’t impact its search rival. Additionally, a Microsoft engineer raised flags earlier this year about the safety of OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Copilot, even taking his case to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). To complicate matters, Google’s AI efforts could see a huge boost as it is reportedly in talks with Apple to power the iPhone maker’s generative AI tools.

In announcing his move to Microsoft, Suleiman to publish On But that may be an understatement. Bloomberg mentioned on Tuesday that Microsoft is instead “hiring most of the employees from startup Inflection AI.” in Blog post Announcing the changes, Inflection said it plans to “build on our AI studio business” in a clear pivot into the enterprise and away from the consumer-facing Pi chatbot.

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

“I have known Mustafa for many years and greatly admire him as the founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product builder, and builder of pioneering teams pursuing bold missions,” Nadella books In a Microsoft blog post. The CEO described Inflection’s newcomers as “some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers and builders in the world.”

Nadella stressed that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI remains a top priority. The maker of ChatGPT provides the core generative AI models for Copilot. “Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI,” he wrote. “We will continue to build out the AI ​​infrastructure including custom systems and silicon work to support OpenAI’s core model roadmap, as well as innovate and build products on top of its core models.”