(Bloomberg) — Microsoft has named Mustafa Suleiman to head its consumer artificial intelligence business and hired most of the staff from the refractive AI startup he founded, as the software giant faces a fiercely competitive market. is trying to fend off Alphabet Inc.’s Google. AI products.
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Co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, Suleiman reports to CEO Satya Nadella and is responsible for various projects including integrating AI CoPilot into Windows and adding conversational elements to the Bing search engine. will be supervised. His hire marks the first time that Microsoft’s consumer AI business is under one leader.
Inflection, a rival to Microsoft’s main AI partner OpenAI, is moving toward selling its AI software to businesses, but will continue to operate its Pi consumer chatbot business for now. Karén Simonyan, co-founder of Inflection, will join Microsoft as lead scientist in the new Consumer AI group.
Over the past year, Nadella has been revamping his company’s core products around OpenAI’s artificial intelligence technology. Under his Copilot brand, Microsoft has incorporated his AI assistant into products such as Windows, consumer and enterprise Office software, Bing, and security tools. Nadella’s multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI has given Microsoft a first-mover advantage as Google and others try to catch up. But 13 months after he unveiled his AI-enhanced Bing search, the company is still making little profit in a market dominated by Google.
“We want to make sure that this next wave is a wave where Microsoft can create really, really great products for consumers,” Suleiman said in an interview.
This new hire also marks another important step for Microsoft to strengthen its AI capabilities and products outside of its relationship with OpenAI. Last month, Microsoft invested $16 million in OpenAI’s French rival Mistral AI. The company said Nadella informed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday about Suleiman and his team joining Microsoft.
“We congratulate Mustafa and Karen on their new roles and look forward to working with them,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “Our partnership with Microsoft is built on leveraging the Azure supercomputer infrastructure built for OpenAI to advance research and train next-generation models, which is at the core of our mission. We will also continue to develop useful AI products like ChatGPT, with the aim of broadly distributing the benefits of AI and driving innovation across industries for everyone.”
Nadella said Microsoft is “very committed” to the partnership with OpenAI. Microsoft will continue to provide startups with cloud computing power to build AI models and use them in their own software. Mr. Suleiman will be tasked with making them attractive and well-designed products for consumers. “We have a large number of state-of-the-art pre-trained models in the world,” Suleiman said. “The real challenge we face is turning these models into real products today.”
In June, Inflexion raised $1.3 billion in one of the largest funding rounds in Silicon Valley’s AI frenzy. The round valued the startup at $4 billion, people familiar with the matter said at the time. Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman is a co-founder of the two-year-old startup along with Suleyman and Simonyan, and other investors include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former Google Eric Schmidt, CEO of Nvidia Corp.
Inflection has been in talks with multiple investors in recent months about raising additional capital, according to people familiar with the conversations. The company declined to comment.
Google fell behind Microsoft in the generative AI race, but is starting to catch up. In February, the company unveiled Gemini, OpenAI’s answer to ChatGPT. The rollout is not fully underway. Google has discontinued a tool that generated realistic images of people after facing criticism that its racial depictions were historically inaccurate. However, Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the company is in talks to license Gemini to Apple for new iPhone features expected later this year. The deal with Apple is Gemini’s most high-profile Google partnership to date, further strengthening the two companies’ relationship over search and making it harder for Microsoft to make money on smartphones.
Inflection’s Pi chatbot is designed to mimic human emotional understanding and interact with users in a supportive way. Despite attracting significant interest from investors, including Microsoft, and his 1 million daily active users, the startup has not succeeded in finding an effective business model, Suleiman said. Ta. Meanwhile, Nadella asked him to move to Microsoft.
“We want to bring real competition,” Nadella said in an interview. “What’s great is that when the media changes, you get to play again what the browser means. What does the operating system even mean? What is the assistant? And that’s the exciting part. It’s not what happened, it’s what’s going to happen, and that’s the resurgence of personal computing.”
Microsoft’s consumer AI products have had their own problems. Bing chats initially became disturbingly personal for some users, forcing the company to temporarily suspend conversations. In February, users reported that Copilot was generating responses that they called strange, unpleasant, and in some cases harmful. Microsoft said users intentionally manipulated Copilot to generate some of these responses. This month, the company’s engineers sent a letter to the board of directors, lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission saying Microsoft is not doing enough to protect its AI image generation tools from creating abusive and violent content. I warned you.
Inflection’s work on tone and its experience training new employees after initially developing its AI software will be important here, Nadella said. “One of the key insights that Pi exemplifies is that pre-training is very important and necessary, but not sufficient,” he said. “All of us in AI recognize that the post-training step may be everything, at least when it comes to product manufacturing.”
Meanwhile, Pi will still be available as a chatbot app, but that may change in the future as the company moves to a business-to-business model where it licenses APIs rather than products, people familiar with the company said. Told. It was acquired in 2010 and acquired by Google four years later. Suleiman is a key public face of the company, speaking at meetings and events about the potential of AI and the ethical guardrails needed for the technology.
However, DeepMind has been heavily criticized for its work in the UK medical field. The company’s first health product was an app called Streams that was originally designed to help doctors identify patients at risk of developing acute kidney injury. In July 2017, the UK data privacy watchdog announced that DeepMind’s project partner, the Royal Free Hospital in London, had illegally given the company access to 1.6 million patient records. Suleiman apologized in a statement at the time.
DeepMind employees were unhappy with his management style, the Financial Times reported. Regarding his complaints at the time, Mr. Suleiman said: I was very demanding and quite persistent. He added that he had set “quite unreasonable expectations” which “led to a very difficult environment for some people”. I still feel extremely sorry for the impact I had on people there and the hurt they felt. ”
Suleiman took a leave of absence in 2019 and moved to Google a few months later, where he led AI product management until his retirement in 2022.
In an interview Monday, Suleiman said he learned a lot from those days about the need for user trust, and Pi’s design was heavily influenced by those lessons. “One of the things I got from him is that trust is absolutely key, a product that’s very transparent to the user, repeatable, reliable enough that the user feels like they’re in control.” We were able to demonstrate that this is not the case.”
Nadella and Suleiman met several years ago when Nadella spoke in London about his book, Hit Refresh, and have remained in touch since then. Discussions about joining Microsoft began over the past few months.
–With assistance from Mark Bergen, Katie Roof, and Shirin Ghaffary.
(Updated with Pi details in 16th paragraph. Previous version was corrected in 3rd paragraph to indicate Inflection is not retreating from the chatbot business.)
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