The co-founder of DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman, has joined Microsoft as the head of its consumer artificial intelligence business, a new role.
After he left DeepMind, Suleyman co-founded generative AI company Inflection AI, which will now limp on after Microsoft also hired another co-founder and much of its staff.
"I’m excited to announce that today I’m joining Microsoft as CEO of Microsoft AI," Suleyman said. "I’ll be leading all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge [browser, not compute]."
Suleyman co-founded AI lab DeepMind in 2010, which was acquired by Google in 2014. He was put on leave in 2019 following complaints that he bullied staff and mismanaged projects.
Later that year, he moved to Google to become vice president of AI product management and AI policy.
In 2022, he co-founded Inflection AI to develop large language models including Pi. The business raised $1.3 billion the next year in a funding round led by Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Nvidia - and Microsoft.
At the time, it said that it would build the largest AI cluster in the world, comprising 22,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs, with the help of GPU cloud company CoreWeave.
It is not clear what the status of that project is, with Suleyman, co-founder Karén Simonyan, and a number of employees moving over to Microsoft.
"Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a public memo to employees.
"We will continue to build AI infrastructure inclusive of custom systems and silicon work in support of OpenAI's foundation model roadmap, and also innovate and build products on top of their foundation models."
Beyond its investment and partnership with market leader OpenAI, Microsoft is developing its own AI services and recently invested in French AI company Mistral AI.
