Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the company has hired some of the team members behind Inflection AI—including co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan—to form a new organization called Microsoft AI. Suleyman is also known as a co-founder of DeepMind, a company that Google acquired in 2014 to ramp up the search giant’s AI team.
Simonyan will be the chief scientist at Microsoft AI. And Mustafa will be an EVP and the CEO at Microsoft AI and will report to Nadella. Microsoft will unveil more about these efforts during a digital event tomorrow.
Before this acquisition, Microsoft was an investor in Inflection AI. Microsoft was the lead investor as part of Inflection AI’s $1.3 billion funding round from June 2023.
When Inflection AI raised that funding round, the company said it was working with NVIDIA and CoreWeave to build one of the largest AI training clusters, which would be powered by 22,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
Here is what Suleyman wrote in a post on X following the deal:
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
Mikhail Parakhin (CEO of Microsoft’s Advertising and Web Services and) his whole team, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge; and Misha Bilenko (Microsoft GenAI CVP) and the GenAI team will move to report to Mustafa.
Kevin Scott will continues as CTO and EVP of AI and will be responsible for the all-up AI strategy, including all system architecture decisions, partnerships, and cross-company orchestration. Rajesh Jha will continue as EVP of Experiences & Devices while building out Copilot for Microsoft 365, partnering closely with Mustafa and team.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
“Karén, a Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Inflection, is a renowned AI researcher and thought leader, who has led the development of some of the biggest AI breakthroughs over the past decade, including AlphaZero.”
“At our core, we have always been a platform and partner-led company, and we’ll continue to bring that sensibility to all we do. Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI. 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. And today’s announcement further reinforces our partnership construct and principles.”
– Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
