Microsoft announced Monday that it has hired Mustafa Suleyman, currently CEO of personal AI company, Inflection AI, to be its CEO of new consumer AI division, Microsoft AI. Suleyman will be leading all consumer AI products and research for Microsoft’s series of Copilot AI assistants, as well as for the Bing search engine and the Edge browser.
Here’s what to know about Suleyman:
1. HE’S BEEN A QUIET PIONEER IN AI
Suleyman cofounded DeepMind (now owned by Alphabet and part of Google) with his friend Demis Hassabis back in 2010. He became the lead for applying DeepMind’s AI throughout Google’s systems. “Sundar [Pichai, Google CEO] basically said to me, ‘Identify new AI-first opportunities for the company,” Suleyman said in an interview with Fast Company last year. “That was my remit and I could work with anybody or do anything.”
At Google in 2019, Suleyman became transfixed with the research breakthroughs in building and training generative AI systems, seeing in it the beginnings of a totally new “conversational” interface between humans and computers. He joined the natural language research team in 2020, where he stayed for almost two years. His major contribution to Google’s work with large language models was developing a method of “grounding” the output of the model to facts and avoiding “hallucinations.”
2. HE WANTED GOOGLE TO ADD CONVERSATIONAL AI TO SEARCH
Suleyman became frustrated with Google’s hesitancy to integrate conversational AI into its products, including Search, during 2020 and 2021. This led to his departure in January of 2022, just weeks after the ChatGPT launch, and got him thinking about starting a company of his own. “I was just too frustrated—I was like, well, I’m gonna do it because I believe that the future of all interfaces is conversational,” he told Fast Company.
3. HE’S BEEN WORKING ON “EMOTIONALLY INTELLIGENT” AI
Inflection AI’s first product, a personal AI assistant called Pi, talks to the user in a personal and empathetic way, and gradually builds up knowledge about the user, based on its conversations with them.
Suleyman’s longtime collaborator and Inflection AI cofounder Karén Simonyan will also leave Inflection AI to become chief scientist at Microsoft AI. And several other Inflection AI researchers will also make the move, Suleyman said in an X post. (LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman is the third Inflection AI cofounder.) InflectionAI will continue under a new CEO and will offer its emotionally intelligent AI as an API to enterprise customers and others.
4. HE WROTE A BOOK PREDICTING HOW AI WILL CHANGE THE WORLD
Suleyman’s 2023 book, The Coming Wave, is a plainspoken and compelling warning about how AI is about to change life as we know it. In the book, Suleyman argues that AI can’t truly be understood in purely technological or philosophical terms, but rather must be seen as a uniquely human creation that could profoundly affect humans and human systems in numerous ways—some of them obvious and others totally novel.
5. HIS HIRE IS ANOTHER MICROSOFT WIN
Microsoft grabbed an early lead among the tech giants when it bought an ownership share in OpenAI with a $10 billion investment in 2023. The company has continued to press its advantage. Aside from building OpenAI models into many of its core consumer productivity and communications products, it has continued placing bets. It recently invested $16 million in the hot French AI startup, Mistral AI. The Suleyman hire is yet another intriguing investment—and he will be tasked with harnessing Microsoft’s own models and the models developed by its partners to shape more compelling consumer products. Applying AI in user-friendly, emotionally intelligent, and human-centered ways has been Suleyman’s forte, so it’s reasonable to expect improvement, and some surprises, in the quality of Microsoft’s AI features.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Sullivan is a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. Before coming to Fast Company in January 2016, Sullivan wrote for VentureBeat, Light Reading, CNET, Wired, and PCWorld.
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