Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of Google DeepMind, has joined Microsoft. In a post on X, Suleyman revealed his plans to join Microsoft as the CEO of a new team responsible for managing the company’s consumer-facing AI products, such as Edge, Bing, and Copilot.
Suleyman will join the company’s senior leadership group, which answers directly to CEO Satya Nadella, and assume the role of executive vice president of Microsoft AI. In 2010, Suleyman co-founded the AI research group DeepMind, which Google eventually purchased in 2014.
One of Google’s most significant AI divisions is still DeepMind. Having said that, Suleyman hasn’t worked for the division in quite a while. He was reportedly placed on leave in 2019 due to differences of opinion over some of the projects he managed. Moreover, several sources reported that Suleyman was harassing employees. SuAftereing placed on leave, Suleyman was appointed vice president of AI product management and AI policy at DeepMind. In 2022, Suleyman departed from Google to become a founder member of Inflection AI.
Along with several of Inflection AI’s employees, including co-founder Karén Simonyan, Microsoft also hired Suleyman. Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s senior vice president of AI, will stay in these positions.
Microsoft recently completed an arrangement with AI startup Mistral and has spent billions in its partnership with OpenAI. It has formed a separate AI team but is still dedicated to its alliances, promising to keep working on AI products and infrastructure that align with OpenAI’s agenda.
Microsoft’s AI assistant was first introduced with Bing Chat (now Copilot), and it has since been added to Office products, Windows 11, and Edge. It is anticipated that further details on Microsoft’s AI projects for Windows and Surface devices will be revealed during a forthcoming AI event before the Build conference in May.
