The tech giant Microsoft has made a bold move by hiring top talent from the high-profile AI startup, Inflection AI. This move is a part of the company’s aggressive efforts to attract skilled individuals under the leadership of Satya Nadella.
Mustafa Suleyman, also known for co-founding DeepMind (which was later acquired by Google), will oversee Microsoft’s new consumer AI unit called Microsoft AI. Along with Suleyman, Karen Simonyan, who joins the company as the chief scientist for the same group, will help propel Microsoft’s AI initiatives forward. Both Suleyman and Simonyan will report directly to Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive.
Their strong knowledge and expertise in the field of AI, along with their impressive accomplishments, make them valuable additions to our team.
Inflection AI, which received a $1.3 billion investment from Microsoft last year, is no stranger to the company. With the hiring of Suleyman and Simonyan, several other members of the Inflection team have also decided to join their co-founders at Microsoft. This includes renowned AI engineers, researchers, and builders, who have been instrumental in advancing AI in the past five years.
Suleyman will also take charge of AI products and research for Copilot, Bing, and Edge, as mentioned in a tweet.
In a blog post, Nadella stated, “We are thrilled to have some of the most talented individuals from Inflection AI join our team at Microsoft. Their expertise and contributions will strengthen our AI efforts tremendously.”
Founded in 2022 by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Suleyman, Inflection AI has been a leading player in the AI startup scene. Their focus has been on developing AI systems that can engage in open-ended dialogue, answer questions, and assist in various tasks. However, with this transition to Microsoft, the company will now shift its focus to the AI studio business. This involves building and testing customer generative AI models.
Highlighting this new direction, Inflection AI stated in a blog post, “Our renewed emphasis on our API also brings about some significant changes in the company.”
As a part of this transition, Inflection AI announced that it will now host Inflection-2.5 on Microsoft Azure. This move is expected to have a far-reaching impact as it will allow the AI services to reach creators worldwide easily. The company has also revealed that in the near future, this API will be available on other cloud hosting platforms as well.
Nadella has been working on establishing this new AI unit for some time now. In fact, he had reached out to OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman last year when they had temporarily left the startup in December.
The chief executive today addressed the growing need for AI innovation and stated, “We are only in the second year of the AI platform shift, and it is critical that we have the capability and capacity to drive groundbreaking innovations.”
