DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman will run Microsoft’s new consumer AI unit

Microsoft has hired Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of Google’s DeepMind and chief executive of artificial intelligence startup Inflection, to run a new consumer AI unit.

Suleyman, a British entrepreneur who cofounded DeepMind in London in 2010, will report to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, the company announced on Tuesday. He will launch a division of Microsoft that brings consumer-facing products, including Microsoft’s Copilot, Bing, Edge, and GenAI under one team called Microsoft AI.

Nadella said in a statement on Tuesday: “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.”

Microsoft will also hire most of Inflection’s staff, including Karén Simonyan, cofounder and chief scientist of Inflection, who will be chief scientist of the AI group, reporting to Suleyman.

Inflection, a rival to Microsoft-backed ChatGPT developer OpenAI, will halt work on its consumer chatbot, Pi, and instead move to sell enterprise AI software to businesses, according to a statement on its website.

This is a developing story.

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