Microsoft hires Inflection founder to run new consumer AI division

Image credits: tech crunch

As Satya Nadella’s cloud giant continues its aggressive efforts to attract top talent, Microsoft has announced that Mustafa Suleiman and Karen Simonian, co-founders of high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, will , and several of their colleagues.

Suleiman is also the co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 to strengthen its AI efforts, and will run Microsoft’s newly created consumer AI division, Microsoft AI. Mr. Simonian will now join the same new group as chief scientist. . Mustafa’s official title at Microsoft is Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI, and he will report directly to CEO Nadella.

Inflectional AI is no stranger to Microsoft. The cloud giant led a $1.3 billion funding round for the startup less than a year ago. At the time of the funding, Inflection AI said it was building the world’s largest AI cluster powered by 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.

Suleiman will also lead AI products and research for Copilot, Bing and Edge. I have written Tweet.

“Several members of the Inflection team have chosen to join Mustafa and Karen at Microsoft,” Nadella wrote in a blog post. “They include some of the world’s best AI engineers, researchers, and builders. Over the past five years, they have designed, led, launched, and co-authored many of the most important contributions in the advancement of AI. I have done so.”

Inflection AI is one of the most prominent AI startups. It was founded in 2022 by LinkedIn co-founders Reid Hoffman and Suleiman with the aim of developing an AI system that can conduct open-ended conversations, answer questions, and assist with various tasks. Inflection AI said in a blog post that it will shift its focus to its AI studio business, which builds and tests customer-generated AI models. “With a renewed emphasis on our APIs, we have made some significant changes internally,” he wrote at Inflection AI.

As part of the transition/situation, Inflection AI said it will host Inflection-2.5 on Microsoft Azure, which it said will help it reach “creators everywhere.” Additionally, “We plan to make it available on other cloud hosting platforms in the near future. The API itself is not currently available, but will be live soon.”

Microsoft seems to have been working on a new AI unit for some time. Nadella had offered to hire OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman when they temporarily exited the startup in December.

Nadella said today that the company and the world are only in their second year of transitioning to an AI platform and that Microsoft “must ensure we have the capacity and ability to boldly innovate.”