Microsoft welcomed DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as the CEO of Microsoft AI, a new division that will lead Copilot AI projects.
Karen Simonyan will also join the team as the chief scientist and will report directly to Suleyman as they proceed to advance Copilot and other Microsoft AI products.
Microsoft AI to Focus on Advancing AI Research, Products
In a blog post, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared the company's vision to build world-class AI products like Copilot. The company is already in its second year of the AI platform shift.
Suleyman left Alphabet in 2022 and started Inflection AI. Simonyan was also the co-founder and chief scientist of the startup. According to Nadella, several employees from Inflection will also be joining the team.
"They include some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers, and builders in the world. They have designed, led, launched, and co-authored many of the most important contributions in advancing AI over the last five years," the CEO shared.
As part of the transition, teams handling Copilot, Bing, Edge, and the GenAI team will now report to Suleyman. The teams will be under Microsoft's AI unit that will produce outputs driven by the AI platform shift.
Microsoft Continues AI Innovation Through Partnership
Nadella also emphasized that Microsoft has always encouraged partner-leading relationships. For instance, some of its AI innovations are brought by its strategic hold 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," he announced.
These days OpenAI has been busy improving its AI models such as the GPT-4 after failing to impress CEO Sam Altman. In addition, the company is also continuing its effort to strike deals with publishing companies to bring training content for AI training.
