Microsoft hires DeepMind co-founder to run Consumer AI
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence lab, is leaving the startup he led to lead Microsoft’s consumer AI business, in another sign of Microsoft’s aggressive plans for the technology.
Mr. Suleyman will report directly to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, the company said Tuesday.
Mr. Suleyman, whose startup Inflection AI has raised $1.5 billion in funding, will be responsible for growing a consumer AI business including Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot, the Bing search engine and the Edge Web browser.
One of his co-founders of Inflection AI, Karén Simonyan, a leading researcher who also came from DeepMind, will also join Microsoft, as will much of their team.
“I’m excited to have them contribute their knowledge, talent and expertise to our consumer AI research and product creation,” said Mr. Nadella. said in an email to staff. He added: “We have been working with speed and intensity, and this influx of new talent will allow us to accelerate our pace again.”
Mr. Suleyman co-founded DeepMind, an ambitious and pioneering AI lab in London, in 2010. After making a breakthrough with AI that could play complex games, DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014.
Mr. Suleyman left Google in 2022 and co-founded Inflection AI, a startup that wants to build a personal AI assistant. In May, it introduced its consumer assistant Pi, which was praised for its friendly, supportive nature but gained only a million daily users, far fewer than OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
With much of Inflection AI’s workforce leaving for Microsoft, the company said it was changing its approach. While it won’t shut down Pi, it will no longer focus on building a consumer business. Instead, it will work with commercial customers to create, test and fine-tune AI systems. Microsoft is also licensing Inflection AI’s latest underlying technology to make it available to enterprise customers of its cloud computing products.
Inflection AI announced that it had hired Sean White, who previously worked at Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox web browser, to take over as CEO.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
As one of the founders of DeepMind, Mr. Suleyman helped popularize the idea that artificial intelligence technology could one day destroy humanity. But he has also expressed concern about the more concrete and immediate dangers associated with the technology, including the spread of misinformation and job losses.
In his recent book “The Coming Wave,” he argued that if these and other dangers could be overcome, the technology would be enormously transformative, especially as a means of drug discovery and other forms of health care.
DeepMind and Inflection AI did not call for the most powerful AI technologies to be open sourced, an approach in which companies share the raw code behind new systems in an effort to increase their popularity and enable outside engineers to address their shortcomings. But Mr Suleyman has argued that AI technologies should not ultimately be controlled by one company.
Whether AI technology should be open source has become a point of discussion among technology companies. Some, like Meta and Elon Musk’s company xAI, argue that open sourcing is the best way to ensure secure technology. But OpenAI, Microsoft’s close partner, has maintained secrecy around the code for its latest technology.