Mustafa Suleyman, the cofounder of UK AI startup DeepMind, has joined Microsoft as CEO of its consumer AI division.
The tech giant has also hired a number of staff from Suleyman’s US-based startup Inflection AI, a rival to OpenAI which he founded in 2022 and raised $1.3bn for last year from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia.
“I’ll be leading all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing and Edge,” Suleyman said on X earlier today. “[DeepMind alumni and Inflection AI cofounder] Karén Simonyan will be chief scientist, and several of our amazing teammates have chosen to join us.”
Suleyman will report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
“I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker, and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions,” Nadella said in a statement.
Inflection will now shift its business model away from its consumer AI chatbot Pi and towards selling enterprise software to businesses, according to a company statement.
Microsoft’s European AI bet
It’s the latest move by Microsoft to ramp up its AI capabilities alongside its $13bn bet on OpenAI — which it last backed in a $10bn round in January 2023.
In February this year, it was announced that Microsoft had inked a partnership with French AI poster child Mistral — meaning that the startup’s AI models will be available on the US tech giant’s cloud computing platform Azure.
“Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. “We will continue to build AI infrastructure inclusive of custom systems and silicon work in support of OpenAI’s foundation model roadmap, and also innovate and build products on top of their foundation models.”
Suleyman’s CV
Suleyman cofounded DeepMind in 2010 and, with a team of researchers plucked from the UK’s top universities, pioneered some of the world’s most high-profile breakthroughs in AI.
The startup was acquired by Google in 2014 for £400m — one of the largest European tech acquisitions ever, at the time.
