Microsoft Assembles Inflection AI and DeepMind Co-Founders for its New AI Division

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s hedge in artificial intelligence paid off this week as it welcomes Inflection AI co-founder and CEO, chief scientist, and other AI techies to Redmond.
• Microsoft, a lead investor in Inflection AI’s $1.3 billion venture round in 2023, will make the company’s latest large language model available on Azure.

Microsoft has, in essence, taken over yet another startup – Inflection AI – absorbing yet another company and its tech into its vast portfolio and onboarding one of the brains behind Google DeepMind. Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is joining Microsoft as head of Microsoft AI. This new consumer AI unit comprises generative AI, Copilot, Bing, and Edge as the EVP and CEO.

Suleyman previously co-founded DeepMind in 2010, joined Google after the search giant acquired DeepMind, and was placed on leave in 2019 following accusations of bullying his staff. He resumed at Google in a different AI product management and policy role and later formally left the company in 2022.

After that, he co-founded Inflection AI with Karén Simonyan, who is taking up the chief scientist role at Microsoft AI. Several other AI engineers, researchers, designers and builders are joining the duo to the newly formed Microsoft AI.

I’m excited to announce that today I’m joining @MicrosoftOpens a new window 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, 2024Opens a new window

Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion in June 2023, with Microsoft as the lead investor, valuing the company at $4 billion. Inflection AI has raised $1.525 billion since it was co-founded by Suleyman, Simonyan, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman in 2022. The company will now be headed by Sean White, co-founder of Braingels, as CEO.

Palo Alto, CA-based Inflection AI has developed Pi, a large language model (LLM) that has attracted one million weekly active users. However, the lack of a viable business model has rendered it out of the public eye. With Inflection-2.5, released only a couple of weeks ago, the company has bigger plans.

See More: Is Microsoft Too Big To Fail in AI?

“Over the last year, we’ve heard countless times that people haven’t been able to replicate the unique conversational style of Pi with publicly available models, and would love to get access to our model and fine-tuning infrastructure. There is a huge opportunity for Inflection here,” Inflection AI posted.

As such, the shake-up ensures that Inflection-2.5 will be available on Microsoft Azure alongside other LLMs. The company also communicated a shift from personal chatbots to focus on commercial business, i.e., enterprises.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s plans to form an AI division have materialized, thanks to what seems like a mutually beneficial deal. At one point during the ensuing drama at OpenAI from CEO Sam Altman’s ouster in November 2023, he and OpenAI president Greg Brockman were poised to take over Microsoft AI.

Microsoft is often criticized for gobbling up smaller companies. This certainly isn’t the case with Inflection AI (or Mistral AI, for that matter), though it almost could’ve been with OpenAI last November. In most instances, Redmond has emerged stronger.

Microsoft’s GenAI CVP Misha Bilenko and Advertising and Web Services CEO Mikhail Parakhin will report to Suleyman.

“At our core, we have always been a platform and partner-led company, and we’ll continue to bring that sensibility to all we do. Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI,” Nadella wrote in a blog post. “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. And today’s announcement further reinforces our partnership construct and principles.”

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Image source: Shutterstock

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