Mustafa Suleiman joins Microsoft to lead the consumer AI products division, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge.
Suleiman will also serve as the executive vice president of Microsoft AI and will join the company's senior leadership team reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella.
I'm excited to announce that today I'm joining @Microsoft as CEO of Microsoft AI. I'll be leading all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge. My friend and longtime collaborator Karén Simonyan will be Chief Scientist, and several of our amazing…
— Mustafa Suleyman (@mustafasuleyman) March 19, 2024
According to The Verge, Mustafa and his partners founded the DeepMind AI lab in 2010, which was acquired by Google 4 years later. In 2019, Suleiman was put on leave due to disputes over some projects he led. Later, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and DeepMind were investigating his actions following complaints of mistreatment of staff.
Google eventually appointed Suleiman as 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 chatbot Pi raised $1.3 billion in one of the largest AI funding rounds in Silicon Valley, valued at $4 billion at the time).
Microsoft is also bringing in some other employees from Inflection AI, including co-founder Karen Simonyan, who will serve as the chief scientist of the division.
"I've known Mustafa for several years and greatly admire him as the founder of DeepMind, as well as of Inflection, and as a dreamer, product maker, and creator of teams of pioneers executing bold missions," Nadella said in a letter to employees. "We have a real chance to build 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 a partnership with OpenAI, and recently struck a deal with the AI startup Mistral. After launching Bing Chat (now Copilot) last year, Microsoft added its AI assistant to Office products, Windows 11, and Edge. The company has also planned a special AI event ahead of the Build conference in May, where it's likely to share more detailed information about its ambitions regarding AI in Windows and Surface devices.
Google is slowly catching up to Microsoft in the AI race and in February released its own response, ChatGPT, a large language model Gemini. Despite imperfect deployment (image generation had to be paused due to complaints about inaccurate rendering), the company is currently in talks with Apple to integrate its AI technology into the iPhone.
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