Microsoft Hires Multiple Inflection AI Leaders, Naming Google DeepMind Co-Founder Its AI CEO

Mustafa Suleyman and his team will focus 'on advancing Copilot and our other consumer AI products and research,' Microsoft said in a statement.

As part of a change in its internal artificial intelligence organization, Microsoft has hired multiple employees from artificial intelligence startup Inflection AI – including the startup’s CEO and co-founder who previously co-founded Google subsidiary DeepMind.

Mustafa Suleyman – the former CEO of Inflection, a startup whose $1.3 billion funding round last year included Microsoft and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates – has become a Microsoft executive vice president and CEO of the newly formed Microsoft AI organization with a focus “on advancing Copilot and our other consumer AI products and research,” according to a Microsoft blog post Tuesday authored by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Joining Suleyman – who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, sold the company to Google in 2014 and left Google in 2022 to co-found Inflection – is Karén Simonyan, Inflection AI co-founder and chief scientist and principal research scientist at DeepMind for about seven years.

[RELATED: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Lauds Sam Altman’s Return As OpenAI’s Leader]

Microsoft Hires DeepMind Co-Founder

The hirings notably come months after Microsoft almost hired Sam Altman – CEO of OpenAI, the organization behind AI tool ChatGPT and part of a major Microsoft partnership powering each of the organizations’ AI offerings. Altman almost joined Microsoft amid his ouster from OpenAI, but returned to OpenAI days later.

CRN has reached out to Microsoft, Inflection and OpenAI for comment.

Close partnerships between tech giants and smaller AI organizations has led to scrutiny in the U.S. and in Europe, according to multiplemedia reports.

In January, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced that Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Google parent Alphabet and Anthropic needed to provide information on their recent investments and partnerships.

Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership – Microsoft is also OpenAI’s largest minority investor – has also led to scrutiny in the U.S. ,

Microsoft has about 400,000 partners, according to the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor. It is a member of CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.

CRN also chose Inflection AI as one of its “10 Hottest AI Startups To Watch For 2024.”

OpenAI Still A Microsoft Partner

In Microsoft CEO Nadella’s post, he said the vendor also hired “several members of the Inflection team” without naming them.

“They include some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers, and builders in the world,” Nadella said. “They have designed, led, launched, and co-authored many of the most important contributions in advancing AI over the last five years. I am excited for them to contribute their knowledge, talent, and expertise to our consumer AI research and product making.”

Nadella’s post hinted at the fierce competition with the likes of former Suleyman employer Google to dominate the emerging AI market – a market that has many solution providers engaged in consultations with customers around AI adoption and working toward AI deployments internally and with customers aimed at cutting down on operational costs and increasing productivity.

“There is no franchise value in our industry and the work and product innovation we drive at this moment will define the next decade and beyond,” Nadella said. “Let us use this opportunity to build world-class AI products, like Copilot, that are loved by end-users! This is about science, engineering, product, and design coming together and embracing a learning mindset to push our innovation culture and product building process forward in fundamental ways.”

He continued: “We have a real shot to build technology that was once thought impossible and that lives up to our mission to ensure the benefits of AI reach every person and organization on the planet, safely and responsibly. I’m looking forward to doing so with you.”

Nadella also reaffirmed his support of the OpenAI partnership, which has resulted in Microsoft offerings such as Azure OpenAI Services and Microsoft supercomputing infrastructure powering OpenAI services – but Nadella stressed that Microsoft will continue to act as “a platform and partner-led company.”

“Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI,” Nadella 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. And today’s announcement further reinforces our partnership construct and principles.”

Nadella’s comments on other Microsoft organization changes as part of the Inflection employees hiring include:

Nadella said in the post that he’s “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.”

He called Simonyan “a renowned AI researcher and thought leader, who has led the development of some of the biggest AI breakthroughs over the past decade including AlphaZero.”

Suleyman posted on LinkedIn about his new role, saying that “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.”

Changes At Inflection AI

In an online post by Inflection – whose personal AI, Pi, is used by millions of people a week – the startup said it will “lean into our AI studio business, where custom generative AI models are crafted, tested and fine tuned for commercial customers.”

“Our success at training, tailoring and improving the performance of large AI models makes us uniquely well placed to be the AI platform for businesses around the world,” according to the post Tuesday.

Inflection named a new CEO, Sean White – even linking to his account on Microsoft-owned social media network LinkedIn – and said it will host Inflection-2.5 on Microsoft Azure, “helping us get it into the hands of creators everywhere.”

“We’ll also be ensuring it comes to other cloud hosting platforms in the near future,” according to the company’s post. “The API itself isn’t available today, but will be up and running very soon. … Between API access and select high-level partnerships with great customers, our AIs can now spread to even larger new user bases while helping put cutting-edge AI capabilities in the hands of thousands of developers.”

On the departures of Suleyman and Simonyan, the post said, “We’re grateful for all their amazing work in getting Inflection to this stage, and wish them luck for this new chapter.”

Inflection also did not name other employees joining Microsoft, but it noted in the post that Reid Hoffman will remain on its board. Hoffman is another Inflection cofounder, cofounder of Microsoft subsidiary LinkedIn and a Microsoft board member.

White, Inflection’s new CEO, has a resume that includes about four years with Mozilla, leaving in 2020 as chief research and development (R&D) officer, according to his LinkedIn account.

Perhaps touching on AI users’ concerns around how the technology uses corporate data and whether corporate data is exposed to other users, Inflection noted that its “privacy and data policies to ensure users are protected remain in place and unchanged” and “no data will be shared with any third parties without users' explicit consent.”

“We are hugely proud of what we’ve achieved with Pi,” according to the post. “There will be no immediate changes to the service and we’re committed to ensuring that users get ongoing access to great AI experiences in the future.”