DeepMind Co-founder Takes Helm at Microsoft’s New AI Division

Deepmind Co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has been named the CEO of Microsoft‘s new AI division.

Suleyman will take the lead at Microsoft AI as its CEO, overseeing its consumer and business-centric AI products and services, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge. As a Microsoft Executive Vice President (EVP), Suleyman will join Microsoft’s senior leadership team and report directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

In a blog post, Nadella wrote:

In that context, I’m very excited to announce that Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan are joining Microsoft to form a new organization called Microsoft AI, focused on advancing Copilot and our other consumer AI products and research.”

Microsoft is hiring Suleyman and recruiting some of Inflection AI’s employees, including co-founder Karén Simonyan, who Nadella described as “a renowned AI researcher and thought leader” and will serve as the chief scientist of Microsoft AI.

Kevin Scott will remain as Microsoft CTO and EVP of AI, overseeing its AI strategy, including system architecture decisions, partnerships, and cross-company orchestration.

“I’m excited to announce that today I’m joining @Microsoft as CEO of Microsoft AI,” Suleyman enthused in a post on X about starting his role. “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 teammates have chosen to join us(…) It’s been an amazing journey, with so much more to come. Thank you to everyone for your support. Things really are just getting started.”

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

Suleyman co-founded Deepmind in 2010, with the AI lab acquired by Google in 2014 and underpinning the tech giant’s AI research for the past decade. However, Suleyman was placed on leave in 2019 following controversy around several of the projects he was overseeing, including the intersection of AI and healthcare, according to a Bloomberg report. Suleyman was then appointed Google’s Vice President of AI Product Management and AI Policy before leaving to co-found Inflection AI two years ago.

“I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection and as a visionary, product maker, and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions,” Nadella added in his blog post.

As part of the shakeup, Mikhail Parakhin and his team, encompassing Copilot, Bing, and Edge, along with Misha Bilenko and the GenAI team, will now report to Suleyman.

Nadella also stressed that this new division will underscore Microsoft’s AI commitments to partners rather than detract from them.

“Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI,” he said. “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.”

Microsoft’s Big Month of AI

Earlier this week, Microsoft and NVIDIA announced significant integrations to implement AI-powered innovations for enterprises.

In an expansion of their long-term collaboration, Microsoft and NVIDIA revealed powerful integrations leveraging the latest NVIDIA Gen AI and Omniverse technologies across Microsoft Azure, Azure AI services, Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft 365.

Microsoft began March by announcing that it had upgraded Copilot to enable secure file reading, which the bot can use to create summaries, discover data, or supplement with information from the internet.

While this may initially raise concerns about enterprise privacy, Microsoft emphasises that users retain ultimate control over the files accessible to the AI.

Last week, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CommBank) and Microsoft announced that they were deepening their pre-existing collaboration with a new strategic emphasis on Gen AI.

Following the signing of a new “letter of intent” by both organisations, the partnership aims to enhance customer benefits by promoting broader adoption of Gen AI and advancing ongoing cybersecurity initiatives.

Finally, Microsoft announced last week that its Planner in Teams project management solution had entered Public Preview.

Previously announced at Microsoft Ignite in November, the new Planner product is a result of Microsoft merging the simplicity of its To Do service, the collaborative capabilities of the previous Planner iteration, the comprehensive features of Project for the web, and the AI-powered assistance of Microsoft Copilot into one unified functionality accessible within Microsoft Teams.