Microsoft Google hired DeepMind Co-founder Mustafa Suleiman. in Share on XSolomon announced that he will join Microsoft as CEO of a new team handling the company's consumer-facing AI products, including Copilot, Bing and Edge.
Solomon will also serve as Executive Vice President of Microsoft AI and will join the company's senior leadership team reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Suleiman co-founded the AI lab DeepMind in 2010, which was later acquired by Google in 2014.
DeepMind has remained a leading force in artificial intelligence within Google. However, Solomon has not been part of the band for many years. He was placed on leave in 2019 due to the controversy surrounding some of the projects he led, according to what the British newspaper “Daily Mail” reported. Report from Bloomberg. The Wall Street Journal It was later reported that Google and DeepMind had opened an investigation into Suleiman over complaints that he bullied employees.
Following her sabbatical at DeepMind, Google announced that it has appointed Soliman as Vice President of AI Product Management and AI Policy. Suleiman left Google in 2022 to co-found the startup Inflection AI.
In addition to hiring Soliman, Microsoft is also hiring some Inflection AI employees, including co-founder Karen Simonyan, who will serve as chief scientist in the Consumer AI group. Kevin Scott will remain as Microsoft's chief technology officer and executive vice president of artificial intelligence.
“I have known Mustafa for many years and greatly admired him as the founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product builder, and builder of pioneering teams pursuing bold missions,” Nadella says in a memo to employees. Published by Microsoft. “We have a real opportunity to build technology previously thought impossible that lives up to our mission of ensuring the benefits of AI reach every person and organization on the planet, safely and responsibly.”
Microsoft has poured billions into its partnership with OpenAI and recently struck a deal with AI startup Mistral. Forming a new AI team does not mean that Microsoft has forgotten about these partnerships. Microsoft says it will “continue building AI infrastructure including custom systems and silicon work to support OpenAI's core model roadmap,” as well as “building products on top of its core models.”
Updated March 19, 1:38 PM ET: Added context about Solomon's time at DeepMind.
“Devoted student. Bacon advocate. Beer scholar. Troublemaker. Falls down a lot. Typical coffee enthusiast.”