Inflection.ai and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman speaks on CNBC’s Squawk Box at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting on January 17, 2024 in Davos, Switzerland.
Adam Galich | CNBC
Microsoft On Tuesday it said it had hired former Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, the artificial intelligence startup Google acquired in 2014, to lead its Copilot AI initiative. Suleyman will become executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella.
Within Google, DeepMind has become a leader in artificial intelligence research, with its work published in Nature and receiving widespread media attention.Traction gets people’s attention Tesla CEO Elon Musk is trying to counter the rise of Google by creating OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence laboratory.
Suleyman left Google’s parent company Alphabet in 2022 and became the co-founder and CEO of the new startup Inflection AI.Nadella wrote in a statement that Inflection co-founder and chief scientist Karén Simonyan will join Microsoft as chief scientist of Microsoft AI, along with “several” employees at the startup. microsoft memo.
A new Microsoft artificial intelligence team will work on developing the Copilot chatbot, which appears in Bing, Windows and other Microsoft products. Consumer AI products and research also fall into this group. Mikhail Parakhin, chief executive of advertising and web services and head of the Copilot, Bing and Edge development teams, will join the new organization led by Suleyman, Nadella wrote. So will Misha Bilenko, corporate vice president of generative artificial intelligence at Microsoft.
“I have known Mustafa for several years and have great admiration for him as the founder of DeepMind and Inflection, as a visionary product maker and builder of pioneering teams pursuing bold missions,” Nadella wrote.
DeepMind told CNBC in 2021 that an outside lawyer was investigating employee concerns about Suleyman’s management style and that he received professional development training.
Demis Hassabis, another co-founder of DeepMind, remains at Google DeepMind. Google is one of Microsoft’s biggest competitors in the field of artificial intelligence, but its Gemini chatbot and image-generating artificial intelligence face a series of problems.
Google withdrew its image generation tool last month after a series of controversies, including historical inaccuracies and controversial responses.
“We have taken the feature offline while we fix the issue,” Hassabis said last month. “We hope to have it back online soon in the next few weeks.” He added that the product “did not comply with the It works the way we expected it to.”
Transforming artificial intelligence, explain A representative for the startup told CNBC that Microsoft invested in the company last year and employs 70 people, most of whom it is currently recruiting. That makes it much smaller than OpenAI, which remains an important strategic partner of Microsoft. Recently, Microsoft has been working to give customers access to artificial intelligence models from other companies, including French startup Mistral.
Inflection has hired a new CEO, former Mozilla executive Sean White, according to a person familiar with the matter. Blog article. Inflection provides a chatbot called Pi, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The startup said it will focus on building customized models for commercial customers.
—CNBC’s Steve Kovach contributed to this report.
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