Microsoft names DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as CEO of AI unit [Video]

Microsoft said Tuesday it has hired former Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of artificial intelligence startup DeepMind that Google acquired in 2014, to lead Copilot AI initiatives. Suleyman will become an executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella.

Inside Google, DeepMind became a leader in AI research, receiving placement for its work in the journal Nature and extensive media attention. The traction caught the eye of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who sought to counter Google’s rise with the creation of a nonprofit AI lab, OpenAI.

Suleyman left Google parent Alphabet in 2022 and became co-founder and CEO of startup Inflection AI. Karén Simonyan, a co-founder of Inflection and its chief scientist, is joining Microsoft as chief scientist for Microsoft AI, alongside “several” of the startup’s employees, Nadella wrote in a Microsoft memo.

The new Microsoft AI group will work on the Copilot chatbot, which appears in Bing, Windows and …