Microsoft has appointed British tech entrepreneur and co-founder of artificial intelligence lab DeepMind and inflection to lead its new AI division Microsoft AI.
Together with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg in 2010, Mustafa Suleyman, 39, co-founded DeepMind which was later sold to Google for £400m in 2014 to form Google DeepMind. Mustafa left DeepMind in 2019 and later founded Inflection AI which has received heavy backing from Microsoft among other investors.
Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, in a statement to Microsoft employees said, “I’m very excited to announce that Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan are joining Microsoft to form a new organization called Microsoft AI, focused on advancing Copilot and our other consumer AI products and research.”
“Mustafa will be EVP and CEO, Microsoft AI, and joins the senior leadership team (SLT), reporting to me. Karén is joining this group as Chief Scientist, reporting to Mustafa. Karén, a Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Inflection, is a renowned AI researcher and thought leader, who has led the development of some of the biggest AI breakthroughs over the past decade including AlphaZero.
Several members of the Inflection team followed Mustafa and Karén at Microsoft. They include some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers, and builders in the world. They have designed, led, launched, and co-authored many of the most important contributions in advancing AI over the last five years. I am excited for them to contribute their knowledge, talent, and expertise to our consumer AI research and product making.
“At our core, we have always been a platform and partner-led company, and we’ll continue to bring that sensibility to all we do. Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI,” Nadella added, saying that Microsoft 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.
Mikhail Parakhin and his entire team, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge; and Misha Bilenko and the GenAI team will move to report to Mustafa to help Microsoft double down on AI innovation.
Kevin Scott continues as CTO and EVP of AI, responsible for all-up AI strategy, including all system architecture decisions, partnerships, and cross-company orchestration. Rajesh Jha continues as EVP of Experiences & Devices and he continues to build out Copilot for Microsoft 365, partnering closely with Mustafa and team.
