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Who is Microsoft AI's new CEO? | Welcome to the 23rd issue of the Tech Wrap-Up Europe newsletter.
Every few weeks, we'll be sharing interesting stories and expert insights from LinkedIn members.
In this issue, Sam Shead, LinkedIn's tech and innovation editor for the UK and Europe, looks at Mustafa Suleyman's journey from co-founding the DeepMind AI lab in London to becoming the CEO of Microsoft AI.
We also talk to the inventor of Pokémon Go about the new AppleVision Pro headset and look at the intensifying battle for top AI talent in Europe.
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Microsoft, LinkedIn's parent company, has a new AI CEO: Mustafa Suleyman.
Reporting directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Suleyman said he will be responsible for leading all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing and Edge.
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For those of you who aren't familiar, Suleyman is the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg. The startup's mission was quite simply to "solve intelligence" and use that to solve everything else.
After raising money from the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the DeepMind founders sold their London-headquartered business to Google in 2014 for a sum reported to be around £400m (€467m).
Suleyman led DeepMind's "applied AI" team and focused on finding new uses for the company's technology in areas such as healthcare and energy. He also oversaw DeepMind’s work on AI ethics and that involved trying to set up an independent board to oversee the lab’s research, which could one day have a huge impact on humanity.
In August 2019, Suleyman announced on X that he was stepping away from DeepMind, adding that he needed a “break to recharge”. Less than half a year later, in December 2019, he announced that he was officially leaving the AI lab to join Google as VP of AI product management and AI policy.
Known to many as "Moose", Suleyman left Google in January 2022 to become a venture capitalist at Silicon Valley firm Greylock, alongside LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who sits on Microsoft's board.
The duo launched a new startup together in March 2022 called Inflection AI and raised more than $1.5bn (€1.4bn) for the business from investors including NVIDIAand Microsoft.
The startup developed a large language model, which it used to power a chatbot called Pi, which had around 1 million daily active users at the start of March. Users appreciated Pi as it was more empathetic and personal than some of the other well-known AIs.
“Even at the bigger tech companies, there’s a relatively small number of people actually building these models,” Suleyman told me in an interview for CNBC when Inflection launched. “One of the advantages of doing this in a startup is that we can go much faster and be more dynamic.”
He added: “My experience of building many, many teams over the last 15 years is that there is this golden moment when you really have a very close-knit, small-focused team. I’m going to try and preserve that for as long as possible.”
Several other members of the Inflection team are joining Microsoft AI, including Karén Simonyan, who will be the division's chief scientist.
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Meanwhile, tech veteran Sean White, who was previously chief research and development officer at Mozilla, has been appointed as Inflection's new CEO.
"Under Sean’s leadership, Inflection will continue on its mission and will reach more people than ever by making its API widely available to developers and businesses all over the world," Hoffman wrote on LinkedIn.
What does Suleyman bring to Microsoft? Join the conversation in the comments.[/size] |
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