Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and CEO of Inflection AI, has joined the Microsoft Copilot team.
The move comes lower than a yr after Inflection raised $1.3 billion to develop “more personal AI,” with Microsoft as a lead investor.
Now as TechCrunch humorously reported“Microsoft announced that it was feasting on Inflection's body and sucking the marrow from its bones (although I believe they phrased it otherwise).”
Suleyman, often called the co-founder of Google's DeepMind, will function EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI. In an internal memo, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella praised Suleyman as “a visionary, constructing products and constructing pioneering teams that pursue daring missions.”
“I’m excited for them to bring their knowledge, talent and expertise to our consumer AI research and product manufacturing,” Nadella said in a single Microsoft blog post.
Suleyman brings along with her several key members of the Inflection team, including Karén Simonyan as chief scientist. Simonyan co-founded Inflection and is thought for “leading the event of a few of the biggest AI breakthroughs of the last decade, including AlphaZero.”
I’m pleased to announce today that I will probably be joining @Microsoft as CEO of Microsoft AI. I’ll lead all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing and Edge. My friend and long-time collaborator Karén Simonyan will probably be chief scientist, and a few of our amazing…
— Mustafa Suleyman (@mustafasuleyman) March 19, 2024
The fate of Inflection itself is less certain. In a blog post, co-founder Reid Hoffman and latest CEO Sean White vowed to show the corporate into “an AI studio company where custom generative AI models are built, tested and refined for business customers.”
Some query the motives of Microsoft, which has now established ties with virtually every generative protagonist except Anthropic. In fact, Inflection is bringing about 22,000 Nvidia H100s, which some speculate will find yourself within the hands of Microsoft.
Suleyman has also been criticized as considered one of technology's more visionary futurists since his 2023 book “The Coming Wave,” which also noted how well his leadership suited Inflection.
One commenter on Suleyman's X post about his position change quipped, “Don't you might have a startup to run?” That you founded? What are you actually looking forward to? That you left Google because… Because big firms act too slowly? This is literally out of your book.”
Don't have a startup? That you founded? What are you actually looking forward to? That you left Google because… Because big firms act too slowly?
This is literally out of your book.— Nikola (@Nikola08200833) March 19, 2024
Microsoft is ahead
Microsoft is now way ahead of its rival Google within the AI competition. Imagine how powerful they’d be in the event that they had captured OpenAI's employees after the dramatic leadership debacle in 2023 that saw Sam Altman fired and rehired.
Meanwhile, Google struggled with missteps surrounding its Gemini AI, which modified the race for historical figures and usually showed lackluster performance and adoption.
As for Inflection's $1.3 billion dream of more personal AI, it seems to have evaporated almost overnight.
The company's rapid decline underscores each the extreme competition and consolidation within the AI space and the ability of Big Tech players like Microsoft to make even essentially the most well-funded startups succeed or fail.
Whether Inflection can reinvent itself stays to be seen – but its most dear assets have clearly been integrated into Microsoft's ever-growing AI empire.
Is there a “third way”?
As big tech firms like Microsoft and Google compete for dominance within the AI space, Anthropic has emerged as a well-funded third way.
Founded by OpenAI graduates Dario Amodei, Chris Olah, and others, Anthropic has attracted large investments from various backers.
In addition to Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt and the Center for Emerging Risk Research, Anthropic is backed by Amazon, which plans to speculate as much as $4 billion, and Google, which plans to speculate as much as $2 billion. So Anthropic will not be completely independent or “independent”.
Additionally, while the corporate's commitment to responsible AI development has been praised in some quarters, it stays to be seen whether for-profit tech giants will fully adopt this approach. However, security principles might be distorted when money is involved.
Big Tech will take control of AI startups at any cost. It's hard to assume the larger AI players not recruiting smaller fish, or no less than recruiting their CEOs on the expense of the startups they've committed to constructing.
