Microsoft hires Mustafa Suleyman to lead newly formed consumer AI division

University drop-out and DeepMind co-founder Suleyman scooped up by Microsoft to be CEO of Microsoft AI

Artificial intelligence pioneer Mustafa Suleyman, one of the co-founders of AI pioneer DeepMind, has been hired by Microsoft to head-up its efforts to integrate AI into its consumer products.

Suleyman has been appointed CEO of Microsoft AI, which will primarily focus on integrating Microsoft's developing AI technology into the company's Copilot AI chatbot, the search engine Bing, the Edge web browser, as well as taking over leadership of Microsoft's GenAI team.

Suleyman announced the move in the time-honoured fashion, with a post on X. He will serve as an executive vice president and report directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

In turn, the heads of the groups behind these products will now report to Suleyman.

This includes Mikhail Parakhin, who is responsible for Copilot, Bing and Edge, and Misha Bilenko and his GenAI team. Kevin Scott continues as chief technology officer and executive vice president of AI, responsible for Microsoft's overall AI strategy, including system architecture decisions, partnerships and cross-company orchestration.

The move was also lauded by Nadella in an email to Microsoft staff in which he re-asserted Microsoft's strategy of developing its AI architectures around OpenAI technology. "Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI. We will continue to build AI infrastructure inclusive of custom systems and silicon work in support of OpenAI's foundation model roadmap, and also innovate and build products on top of their foundation models," he wrote.

Suleyman left Google DeepMind, as his old company was rebranded, in 2022 to co-found InflectionAI, which will continue independently under the leadership of a new CEO.

However, a number of InflectionAI staff will be joining Suleyman at Microsoft. These include co-founder Karén Simonyan, who will serve as the chief scientist of Microsoft AI, "and several of our amazing team mates", according to Suleyman

Nadella added: "They include some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers, and builders in the world. They have designed, led, launched, and co-authored many of the most important contributions in advancing AI over the last five years. I am excited for them to contribute their knowledge, talent, and expertise to our consumer AI research and product making."

Awarded a CBE in the 2019 New Year's Honours List, Suleyman had dropped out of university at the age of 19, instead establishing the Muslim Youth Helpline telephone counselling service with a friend. After that, he worked as a policy officer on human rights for Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London from 2000 until 2008; then founded consultancy Reos Partners.

He co-founded DeepMind Technologies in September 2010, alongside Demis Hassabis – who remains at Google, running Google DeepMind – and Shane Legg, who also remains at Google DeepMind as the organisation's chief AGI scientist.