Mustafa Suleyman at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2024. Image: World Economic Forum/Greg Beadle/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Suleyman worked for DeepMind and Google before he co-founded start-up Inflection AI. Now he will lead Microsoft’s consumer AI efforts.
Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, has been hired by Microsoft to form a new organisation within the tech giant.
Suleyman has been hired to create Microsoft AI, a new organisation that will focus on advancing the company’s consumer AI products – such as Copilot – and its research in this field. Karén Simonyan, another Inflection AI co-founder, will join this new organisation as its chief scientist.
Suleyman will be EVP and CEO of this new division and will be part of Microsoft’s senior leadership team, reporting directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Suleyman has been involved in AI for a long time, having co-founded of DeepMind in 2010, the AI-focused research organisation that was later acquired by Google. He remained in DeepMind for nearly 10 years but left amid complaints that he allegedly had an aggressive management style.
Suleyman then worked with Google as VP of AI product management and AI policy between 2020 and 2022, before leaving to co-found Inflection AI and lead it as CEO.
“I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions,” Nadella said.
Nadella said that several members of the Inflection AI team have chosen to also join Suleyman and Simonyan at Microsoft, which includes “some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers and builders in the world”.
Suleyman announced his new role on X and confirmed that multiple staff members from Inflection AI are also joining Microsoft.
“Inflection AI will continue on its mission under a new CEO, and look to reach more people than ever by making its API widely available to developers and businesses the world over,” Suleyman said.
“It’s been an amazing journey, with so much more to come. Thank you to everyone for your support. Things really are just getting started.”
The decision by Microsoft to take members of the Inflection AI team comes less than two weeks after the start-up revealed its latest language model – Inflection 2.5. The company claimed this model is “neck and neck” with OpenAI’s GPT-4 “on all benchmarks”, but that it used less than half the compute to train.
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Mustafa Suleyman at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2024. Image: World Economic Forum/Greg Beadle via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
