Microsoft named Mustafa Suleyman as head of its consumer AI business. Suleyman was one of the co-founders of Inflection AI (creator of Pi) and ex-DeepMind. The company also hired more staff from the Inflection AI team.
Microsoft is as for-profit a tech company as they get, and they have gone all in into AI. So, naturally, the most important position inside the company is the head position of its consumer artificial intelligence arm or Microsoft AI.
Mustafa Suleyman is a big name in AI circles. His website chronicles the groundbreaking work he has done on the consumer/application side of generative AI. Notably, Suleyman was a co-founder of the AI lab called DeepMind, which was acquired by Google and is currently working on some of the most significant technologies in AI, machine learning, and robotics. After that, he co-founded another lab or startup called Inflection AI – a proper Silicon Valley company focused on creating “personal intelligence” for everyone’s use. Now, he’s been snatched by Microsoft, alongside a large chunk of Inflection AI’s staff.
Another co-founder, Karén Simonyan, will also be joining Microsoft as chief scientist.
Notably, Microsoft has a strong partnership with OpenAI. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was one of the competitors of Inflection AI’s Pi. But at the same time, Microsoft has kept amping up its in-house AI capabilities. The Copilot brand is completely built for the Windows OS, for example. This new hire hints at just how seriously the company is taking AI. It’s not only investing in AI startups in a big way but also spending millions of dollars in nurturing its own AI talent.
So far, Microsoft’s consumer-facing AI products have been led by separate teams. Now, they will all be reporting to Suleyman, who will steer the ship for all of Microsoft’s AI products such as Windows Copilot and Bing AI.
