Microsoft has hired DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as head of its consumer AI division.
Suleyman, one of the biggest names in AI, will be CEO of Microsoft AI and will join the senior leadership team reporting directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
The appointment, which marks a major coup for Microsoft in the ongoing generative AI race, will see it lead research into AI products spanning its Copilot, Bing and Edge offerings.
“I have known Mustafa for several years and greatly admire him as the founder of DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product creator, and builder of pioneering teams pursuing bold missions,” Nadella said in a statement.
“These teams are at the forefront of innovation at Microsoft, bringing energy and ethics of new entrants to a changing consumer products landscape driven by AI platform change,” he added.
“We have a real opportunity to develop technology once thought impossible that lives up to our mission of ensuring that the benefits of AI reach every person and organization on the planet, safely and responsibly.”
Microsoft has invested a lot of time and money to position itself at the forefront of the ongoing race for AI talent. In November last year, Nadella hoped to hire OpenAI chief Sam Altman as head of a new advanced AI research team because of the chaos that erupted at the company.
However, after a few dramatic days, Altman returned to OpenAI.
Who is Mustafa Suleyman?
Suleyman joins Microsoft after most recently serving as CEO of Inflection AI, which he also co-founded. Like other startups in the AI space over the past two years, Inflection saw rapid growth during the early days of the generative AI “boom.”
In June last year, Inflection revealed that it had raised an additional $1.3 billion in funding led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and Nvidia, bringing its total funding to $1.525 billion.
At the time, the company said it was building the world's largest AI cluster based on 22,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs to power its “Pi” personal AI assistant. Pi's millions of users have shared more than 4 billion messages and the product has grown to six million users.
Following Suleyman's departure, the company named Sean White as CEO and also announced that Inflection-2.5 will be hosted on Microsoft Azure.
Before founding Inflection, Suleyman was one of the founders of the artificial intelligence company DeepMind. The UK-based artificial intelligence company pioneered the field of deep reinforcement learning and using games to test its systems.
A program called DQN learned to play 49 different Atari games from scratch by looking at the pixels on the screen. In 2015, DeepMind's AlphaGo was the first computer program to defeat a world Go champion, and in 2019 its AlphaStar managed to beat a top professional player in StarCraft II.
Google acquired DeepMind for $400 million in 2014.
“During his ten years at the company, Mustafa led applied research and commercialization efforts, helped establish DeepMind as a global leader in AI and ethics research and development, and contributed to numerous high-impact research publications,” notes his own website.
An advocate for 'AI containment'
In September 2023, Suleyman published a book titled The next wave: technology, energy and the biggest dilemma of the 21st centurywhich analyzed the impact of the rise of AI.
The next wave of AI will usher in a “new dawn for humanity that will create wealth and surplus like we have never seen before,” he said, but the rapid proliferation of these technologies could also lead to disruption, instability and even catastrophe.
As he explained in a video promoting the book, this wave will create an “immense dilemma that will define the century ahead of us. Our future depends on these technologies and yet it is also endangered by them.”
His answer, in the book, is a “containment program” that works in 10 concentric layers.
This starts with the development of the technology itself and continues from there, potentially even using “choke points across the ecosystem” to buy time for regulators and defensive technologies.”
Suleyman is also a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs working on the geostrategic challenges of future artificial intelligence systems, and a member of the board of directors of The Economist.
