Microsoft now has a sole leader overseeing consumer AI for the first time. DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman joined the company from competitor Inflection AI. Suleyman will try to push the consumer-facing Copilot assistant into the future as the company prepares for a long fight with Google for artificial intelligence supremacy among Silicon Valley’s Big Five companies.
Suleyman’s official title will be Vice President and CEO of the new division called Microsoft AI, and he will report directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Alongside him, Inflection AI co-founder Karén Simonyan will assume the title of Chief Scientist.
“Messy” might be one way to describe Microsoft’s launch of Copilot. Despite jumping off a fast start to take the lead over Google, bloomberg We reported in January that Bing’s market share had barely budged compared to its search rivals. Additionally, Microsoft engineers raised a flag over the safety of OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Copilot earlier this year, filing a case with the FTC. To further complicate matters, Google’s AI efforts could be significantly boosted as the company is reportedly in talks with Apple to bolster the iPhone maker’s generative AI tools.
I’m excited to announce that I’m joining today. @Microsoft CEO of Microsoft AI. I will lead all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge. My friend and long-time collaborator Karén Simonyan will be the Chief Scientist, and will lead our amazing…
— Mustafa Suleiman (@mustafasuleyman) March 19, 2024
Suleyman announced his move to Microsoft Posted X (on Twitter) said that “several of our amazing team members” from Inflection AI will be joining him and Simonyan at Microsoft AI. But that might be an understatement. bloomberg On Tuesday, Microsoft reported that it was “hiring most of its employees from the Inflection AI startup.” In a blog post announcing the changes, Inflection said it plans to “lean into our AI studio business” with an apparent shift away from consumer-facing Pi chatbots and toward enterprises.
Suleyman co-founded DeepMind in 2010, four years before Google acquired the British-American AI startup for a reported sum of between $400 million and $650 million. Suleyman left DeepMind to join Google in 2019, and three years later he left to co-found Inflection AI.
“I have known Mustafa for many years and have great respect for him as the founder of DeepMind and Inflection, a visionary, product builder, and builder of visionary teams pursuing bold missions,” Nadella wrote on the Microsoft blog. . The CEO described the incoming Inflection expats as “some of the brightest AI engineers, researchers and builders in the world.”
Nadella emphasized that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI remains a top priority. The makers of ChatGPT provide default 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 our AI infrastructure, including custom systems and silicon work that supports OpenAI’s foundational model roadmap, and innovate and build products on top of our foundational models.”
This news about Suleyman’s role and the company’s AI division arrives just days ahead of Microsoft’s Surface event scheduled to take place on March 21. Since it is titled “New Era of Work,” it is likely to be corporate-focused. Of course, the term “AI” has already appeared. The company said it will showcase “the latest technologies to extend AI in the user experience through Copilot, Windows, and Surface.” You can watch via live streaming on Microsoft’s website, or come back here as we’ll cover announcements as they become available.