Mustafa Suleiman joins Microsoft to lead the company’s artificial intelligence division, which develops consumer-facing AI products, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge.
Suleiman will also serve as executive vice president of Microsoft AI and join the company’s senior management team, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella.
Pros according to The Verge, Mustafa co-founded the artificial intelligence lab DeepMind in 2010, which was acquired by Google 4 years later. In 2019, Suleiman sent on vacation in due to controversy over some of the projects he led. Later, The Wall Street Journal wrote that Google and DeepMind investigate his actions following complaints about staff bullying.
Soon after, Google announced that it had appointed Suleiman to the position of vice president of AI product management and AI policy. Mustafa eventually left the company in 2022 to co-found the startup Inflection AI (in June the startup that created the Pi chatbot has raised $1.3 billion in one of the largest artificial intelligence funding rounds in Silicon Valley and was valued at $4 billion at the time).
Microsoft is also bringing on some other Inflection AI employees, including co-founder Karen Simonian, who will work as the unit’s chief scientist.
«I’ve known Mustafa for several years and admire him greatly as the founder of DeepMind and Inflection, as a dreamer, a product maker, and a builder of pioneering teams that accomplish bold missions,» Nadella said in a letter to employees. «We have a real chance to create a technology that was once thought impossible, and that aligns with our mission to ensure that the benefits of artificial intelligence reach every person and organization on the planet safely and responsibly».
Microsoft has invested billions in partnership with OpenAI and recently signed a deal with AI startup Mistral. After the launch of Bing Chat (now Copilot) last year, Microsoft added its AI assistant to Office, Windows 11, and Edge products. The company has also planned a special AI event ahead of the Build conference in May, where it is likely to share more details about its ambitions for AI in Windows and Surface devices.
Google is slowly catching up to Microsoft in the AI race and in February released its own answer to ChatGPT, the Gemini large language model. Although the rollout was not perfect (image generation had to be suspended due to complaints about inaccurate representation of races), today the company is in talks with Apple to integrate its own AI technology into the iPhone.