Microsoft hires DeepMind co-founder to lead its new consumer AI division

Microsoft now has a lone leader overseeing consumer AI for the first time. DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleiman joins the company from rival Inflection AI. Suleiman will try to push the consumer-centric assistant Copilot into the future, preparing for what could be a long battle with Google for artificial intelligence supremacy among Silicon Valley’s Big Five.

Suleiman’s official title will be executive vice president and CEO of a new division called Microsoft AI, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella. He will be joined by Inflection AI co-founder Karen Simonian, who assumes the title of chief scientist.

“Messy” might be one way to describe Microsoft’s Copilot implementation. Despite its quick jump out of the starting blocks to take the lead over Google, Bloomberg reported in January that Bing’s market share barely moved the needle relative to its search rival. In addition, a Microsoft engineer raised flags earlier this year about the safety of DALL-E 3 and OpenAI’s Copilot, even taking his case to the FTC. Further complicating matters, Google’s AI efforts could get a huge boost as it is reportedly in talks with Apple to power the iPhone maker’s generative AI tools.

In announcing his move to Microsoft, Suleiman published on X (Twitter) that “a few of our amazing teammates” from Inflection AI will be joining him and Simonyan at Microsoft AI. But that might be an understatement. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Microsoft is instead “hiring most of the staff from its startup Inflection AI.” IN blog post announcing the changes, Inflection said it plans to “lean into our AI studio business” in an apparent pivot into the enterprise and away from its consumer-focused Pi chatbot.

Suleiman co-founded DeepMind in 2010, four years before Google bought the British-American AI startup for what it said was between $400 million and $650 million. Suleiman left DeepMind in 2019 to join Google, and three years later left to co-found Inflection AI.

“I have known Mustafa for several years and greatly admire him as the founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product developer, and creator of pioneering teams that pursue bold missions,” Nadella wrote in a Microsoft blog post. The CEO described Inflection’s incoming expats as “some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers and builders in the world.”

Nadella emphasized that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI is still a top priority. The creator of ChatGPT provides the core generating 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 AI infrastructure, including custom systems and silicon work to support OpenAI’s core model roadmap, and also innovate and build products on top of their core models.”