Meet Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI’s new CEO

Microsoft has appointed DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as the head of a newly created consumer AI unit and hired several employees of his Inflection AI startup, seeking to defend its lead against rising competition from Google.

Microsoft’s push for AI

Suleyman will be CEO of the unit, Microsoft AI, the company said on Tuesday, bringing under one roof its consumer AI efforts such as its Copilot chatbot and the new Bing browser that uses the technology.

The Copilot, built using technology from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, is the lynchpin of Microsoft‘s efforts to generate revenue from its AI efforts and can write emails, summarise documents and make presentations.

I’m excited to announce that today I’m joining @Microsoft as CEO of Microsoft AI. I’ll be leading all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing and Edge. My friend and longtime collaborator Karén Simonyan will be Chief Scientist, and several of our amazing…

— Mustafa Suleyman (@mustafasuleyman) March 19, 2024

“This infusion of new talent will enable us to accelerate our pace yet again,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a blog post.

“As part of this transition, Mikhail Parakhin and his entire team, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge; and Misha Bilenko and the GenAI team will move to report to Mustafa,” he said.

Biography

Suleyman, the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, built the personal AI Pi. On his website, he writes that Pi was built “with world class personality and empathy, and productivity use cases competitive against the world’s leading models.”

Pi’s millions of users have shared over 4 billion messages (and counting), and the product has grown to 6 million users.

He has previously worked at Google as VP of AI Products and AI Policy.

Before that he co-founded DeepMind, which was bought by Google in 2014.

His Sunday Times bestselling book,  The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, was published in September 2023, and has since been translated into 32 languages.

Exploring the widespread impact of frontier technologies, Bill Gates described it as: “An excellent guide for navigating unprecedented times.”

Suleyman, whose father was originally from Syria and his mother a nurse for the UK’s National Health Service, has been recognised in the US and UK. In 2019, he received the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and the same year he accepted the Silicon Valley Visionary Award.

Competition

Suleyman’s appointment comes when Microsoft has been partnering with other startups including France’s Mistral AI against the backdrop of heightened regulatory scrutiny of its tie-up with OpenAI.

Nadella said on Tuesday that Microsoft is “very committed” to its OpenAI partnership.

Karen Simonyan, who co-founded Inflection AI along with Suleyman and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman, will join as chief scientist.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s Google unit is expanding its AI-related efforts.

Bloomberg News reported on Monday that Apple was in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone.

Inflection AI has emerged as one of the most high-flying names in the GenAI race after raising $1.3bn from Microsoft and Nvidia in a mix of cash and cloud credit at a valuation of $4bn last June.

The startup behind the chatbot Pi said on Tuesday Sean White, former head of research and development at Mozilla, will be its new CEO and that it plans pivot to serving models to commercial customers, instead of focusing on consumers.

It also added that its Inflection-2.5 will be available on Microsoft Azure.

Read: Who are OpenAI’s strongest competitors?