In a bold move, tech giant Microsoft has announced the establishment of a new London hub for its cutting-edge consumer AI division. Spearheading this new venture is Jordan Hoffmann, a skilled AI scientist and engineer who was recently acquired by Microsoft from renowned AI startup Inflection AI, in which Microsoft heavily invested last year.
This announcement comes just three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed the creation of the consumer AI division, which is led by Inflection AI’s founders, including Mustafa Suleyman, also known as the co-founder of Deepmind, an AI company that was acquired by Google in 2014.
During the initial announcement, Nadella shared that “several members of the Inflection team” had joined Microsoft’s new AI unit (Bloomberg reported that most actually joined). Now, it has been revealed that one of those members is Hoffmann, a former PhD student who joined Deepmind as a research scientist in 2020 and later moved to Inflection AI when Suleyman founded the startup in 2022 and began recruiting employees from Deepmind and Meta.
In a blog post published today, Suleyman praises Hoffmann as an “exceptional AI scientist and engineer” and announces that, with Suleyman reporting directly to Nadella in the U.S., Hoffmann will serve as the head of the new London unit.
Suleyman also reveals that job postings for the London hub will be posted in the “coming weeks and months” as they search for fresh AI talent to join Hoffmann at Microsoft’s Paddington office. This team will focus on developing new language models and associated infrastructure and tooling.
This announcement ties in with another recent declaration made in partnership with the U.K. Government, in which Microsoft committed to investing £2.5 billion ($3.15 billion) in the U.K. over the next three years. This investment includes expanding its datacentre facilities and providing AI education to over one million people in preparation for the growing AI economy.
The U.K. is recognized as one of the leading countries in terms of AI research and development investment, ranking after the U.S. and China. With Google’s DeepMind also headquartered in London, we may witness a fierce battle for top AI talent between these two frontrunners in the race for AI supremacy.
On a related note, Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis was recently honored with a knighthood for his “services to artificial intelligence.”
TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for further details on the scale of its U.K. AI hub, but the company declined to share any specifics at this time.
