REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday named AI luminary Mustafa Suleyman to lead a newly created consumer artificial intelligence division, as the software giant looks to sharpen its edge in an increasingly competitive market for AI-powered products and hired numerous employees from Suleyman's startup, Inflection.
Suleyman, a co-founder of Alphabet Inc.'s DeepMind, will report directly to Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella and oversee key projects including integrating the widely anticipated AI assistant Copilot into the Windows operating system and bolstering conversational abilities in the Bing search engine. The appointment marks the first time Microsoft's consumer AI efforts have had a dedicated senior leader.
Suleyman's mandate is to turn AI technologies developed by the likes of OpenAI into compelling, well-designed products for consumers, Nadella said.
The move not only strengthens Microsoft's AI firepower but also ripples through industry partnerships. Inflection, a rival to Microsoft's key AI partner OpenAI, has decided to wind down its Pi consumer chatbot project and focus on selling AI software to businesses. Separately, one of Inflection's other co-founders, Karén Simonyan, is joining Microsoft as chief scientist of the consumer AI division.
Over the past year, Microsoft has made a concerted effort under Nadella to weave AI technology from OpenAI throughout its flagship products. Microsoft has integrated AI helpers, under the Copilot brand, into Windows, its Office software for consumers and businesses, its Bing search engine and its security tools.
Yet despite a significant head start and an investment of more than $10 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft has struggled to make meaningful headway in search 13 months after launching an AI-enhanced version of its Bing search engine, as Google continues to dominate the market. "We want to make sure that we create the truly amazing consumer experiences in the next wave," Suleyman said in an interview.
Suleyman's addition signals a growing emphasis on building up Microsoft's own internal AI research and product development, beyond its partnership with OpenAI. Last month, Microsoft invested $16 million in OpenAI's French rival, Mistral AI. Nadella told OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman about Suleyman and his team joining Microsoft on Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.
"We want to warmly congratulate Mustafa and Karén on their new roles, and we look forward to our continued partnership with them," an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. "Our partnership with Microsoft is rooted in a shared mission to advance our research and train the next generation of models on Microsoft's Azure supercomputing platform, purpose-built for OpenAI. And it extends to the development of useful AI products like ChatGPT, designed to make the benefits of AI widely accessible and drive innovation and progress across industries for the benefit of society."
Nadella emphasized the importance of Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, saying the companies will continue to collaborate on cloud computing to build AI models and deploy them in Microsoft software products. "We have a lot of great pretrained models in the world. The real challenge is how do you convert those into compelling products," he added.
Last June, Inflection closed a $1.3 billion funding round, at the time the largest single investment in a company during Silicon Valley's AI boom. The fundraising valued the two-year-old startup at $4 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman co-founded the startup, whose other investors include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Nvidia Corp.
Inflection has been in talks with investors about a follow-on financing in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter. The company declined to comment.
Once a laggard in the generative AI race, Google has been playing catch-up. In February, Google introduced a large language model called Gemini to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT. Despite a rocky launch -- Google pulled an image-generation tool that was criticized for inaccurate racial depictions of historical figures -- the company has reportedly been in talks with Apple Inc. about licensing Gemini to power new features on iPhones later this year. If successful, such a deal would mark Google's most significant Gemini licensing agreement to date, deepening its search relationship with Apple and potentially posing a challenge to Microsoft in the smartphone market. Inflection 与微软：
Inflection's empathetic AI chatbot, Pi, caught Microsoft's attention despite Inflection's lack of a sustainable business model. Satya Nadella personally recruited Suleyman to join Microsoft.
Nadella envisions "real competition" and the potential to redefine what browsers, operating systems, and intelligent assistants can do.
微软人工智能的挑战：
While innovative, Microsoft's consumer AI products have faced challenges. Bing's chatbot initially displayed overly personalized and sometimes disturbing responses, forcing Microsoft to limit conversation lengths. Copilot has also raised concerns about potentially harmful responses. Most recently, a Microsoft engineer warned of the lack of safeguards against misuse and violence in Microsoft's image-generation AI tool.
Suleyman's Role:
Nadella sees Inflection's success in controlling tone and training AI software post-deployment as valuable in addressing these challenges. He emphasizes the importance of "post-training, which everyone in AI, at least on the product side of things, understands is probably the most important step."
Suleyman's Career History:
Suleyman has been a prominent figure in AI since DeepMind's founding in 2010. He has publicly shared insights on AI's potential while stressing the need for ethical boundaries.
DeepMind faced controversy over a healthcare partnership, with allegations of unauthorized handling of patient data. Suleyman apologized for his role in the incident.
Former DeepMind employees also raised concerns about Suleyman's management style. He acknowledged his "very demanding of myself and my teams, to the point of being unforgiving." He regretted setting "expectations that were too hard, sometimes unreasonable," creating a "difficult environment for some people."
After a 2019 leave of absence, Suleyman left DeepMind in 2022 to lead AI product management at Google.
Suleyman's Lessons Learned:
Reflecting on his experiences, Suleyman believes user trust is paramount and has influenced Pi's design. "I deeply believe trust is the foundation for anything we're doing. We need to be super transparent, we need to constantly demonstrate that our products are not just reliable, but people feel in control."
Nadella and Suleyman first met in London a few years ago. Talks regarding Suleyman's move to Microsoft began months ago.
