Heaptalk, Jakarta — Microsoft has appointed Google’s DeepMind Founder, Mustafa Suleyman, as the CEO of a newly created consumer AI unit, Microsoft AI, to defend its lead against rising AI competition from Google.
Following this plan, several employees of Suleyman’s Inflection AI startup, including Karen Simonyan, who will serve as Chief Scientist, and Kevin Scott as CTO and Executive Vice President, will also join the team and oversee the company’s consumer-facing AI products, spanning Copilot Bing, and Edge, where Copilot technology will appear in various Microsoft products, including Windows and the Bing search engine.
As he revealed on his X’s account, “I am excited to announce that today I am joining Microsoft as CEO of Microsoft AI. I will lead all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge. My friend and longtime collaborator Karen Simonyan will be Chief Scientist, and several of our amazing teammates have chosen to join us.”
Suleyman left Microsoft’s competitor, Google’s parent company in 2022. Before leaving this company, he was one of the founders of Google’s startup DeepMind, its subsidiary since 2014. As is known, Google acquired this startup for USD500 million, one of the first large bets by a big tech company on a startup AI lab.
After his resignation, Suleyman founded and assumed the CEO position at startup Inflection AI, which has existed as one of the most known in GenAI after bagging funding of US$1.3 billion from Microsoft and Nvidia last June.
“I am excited for them to contribute their knowledge, talent, and expertise to our consumer AI research and product making. We have been operating with speed and intensity. This infusion of new talent will enable us to expedite our pace yet again,” Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, wrote in an email, The New York Times reported.
In its effort to boost its AI capabilities to remain competitive with other rivals, Microsoft’s CEO emphasized that Microsoft’s strategic cooperation with OpenAI is still the company’s highest priority, as OpenAI’s ChatGPT underlying GenAI for Copilot.
