Microsoft has named the co-founder of British artificial intelligence lab DeepMind as head of a new AI division.
Mustafa Suleyman, 39, co-founded DeepMind with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg in 2010 and the company was later bought by Google for £400 million in 2014. It now forms the heart of Google’s AI efforts after having merged with another unit to become Google. DeepMind in 2023.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced in a blog post that the British AI pioneer, who left DeepMind in 2019, will be chief executive of a new organization called Microsoft AI, focused on the American company’s consumer products and research. Several employees from Sulyeman’s startup Inflection AI will join the division.
Microsoft has become a major player in generative AI – technology that immediately produces compelling text, image or audio from simple hand-typed prompts – thanks to its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot.
Nadella said: “I have known Mustafa for several years and greatly admire him as the founder of DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker and builder of pioneering teams who take on bold missions. .
The new division brings together Microsoft’s consumer AI efforts, such as its Copilot chatbot and the new Bing browser that uses the underlying ChatGPT technology. Copilot is at the center of Microsoft’s efforts to generate revenue through its AI efforts and can write emails, summarize documents and give presentations.
“This infusion of new talent will allow us to accelerate our pace once again,” Nadella wrote.
Karen Simonyan, who co-founded Inflection AI with Suleyman and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman, will join the new unit as chief scientist.
Google is expanding its AI efforts. Bloomberg News reported Monday that Apple is in talks to integrate Google’s Gemini AI product into the iPhone.
Inflection AI has become one of the most prestigious names in the genAI race after raising $1.3 billion from Microsoft and chipmaker Nvidia at a $4 billion valuation last June.
Suleyman, born in north London to a Syrian father and an English mother, recently published a book on AI, The Coming Wave, which highlights the technology’s potential benefits but also warns that it could threaten world order and calls for a significant increase in technology. the number of researchers working on AI security.
In an interview with the Guardian last year, Sulyeman called the book “provocation”.
“I think what’s cool about what I do is that I predict something,” he said. “And I think a lot of people don’t have the courage to predict things. I don’t think I’m wrong, but we have time to intervene.