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Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's artificial intelligence chief, is constructing a brand new team focused on consumer health, hiring people from the same division he once led at Google DeepMind as rival corporations compete to develop lucrative applications compete with cutting-edge technology.
Suleyman, a British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, has hired Dominic King, DeepMind's former head of healthcare and a British-trained surgeon, as vice chairman of Microsoft AI's latest London healthcare team.
He also poached Christopher Kelly, a clinical research scientist at DeepMind and a neonatal intensive care physician at Evelina Children's Hospital in London, in addition to two others from his time on the AI ​​start-up.
Microsoft's latest consumer AI healthcare division comes at a time when tech corporations are looking for to make generative AI an everyday a part of on a regular basis life to extend revenue from the rapidly evolving technology. Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, can also be focused on healthcare, comparable to leading spin-off AI group Isomorphic Labs, which is working on drug discovery.
Health has turn into certainly one of the expansion areas of the AI ​​boom. Consumers have often turned to the web for health-related questions, and a Deloitte survey this 12 months found that 48 percent of respondents asked generative AI chatbots comparable to ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Claude health-related questions.
This includes questions on specific health conditions, symptoms and mental health. Microsoft AI's healthcare division will deal with some of these consumer healthcare applications using generative AI.
The US technology group that hired Suleyman earlier this 12 months confirmed the creation of its latest unit. “Health is a critical use case in our mission to tell, support and empower everyone with responsible AI,” Microsoft said. “We proceed to rent top talent to support these efforts.”
Google DeepMind's healthcare operation, founded by Suleyman, was founded in 2016 and grew to a team of greater than 100 people based in London. The unit had signed a five-year partnership with 10 UK NHS hospitals to process the medical data of 1.6 million patients and launched an app to watch patients' vital signs.
However, DeepMind later became embroiled in controversy over its work for the UK healthcare sector because of concerns concerning the security of patient data. That led to Suleyman's unit being spun off from parent company Alphabet in 2019 right into a Google unit in California run by David Feinberg, the previous chief executive of Geisinger, certainly one of the biggest private healthcare corporations within the US.
Suleyman left DeepMind that very same 12 months and took on a brand new policy role at Google's California headquarters before leaving the corporate in 2022 to work as a enterprise investor. He later founded the AI ​​start-up Inflection.
In March, Microsoft hired Inflection's Suleyman and most of its employees, including Karén Simonyan, Inflection's co-founder and chief scientist and a former DeepMind researcher herself.
Other latest hires for Microsoft's AI health unit include Peter Hames, the previous chief executive of British digital health startup Big Health, and Bay Gross, co-founder of digital health provider Cityblock Health.
As a part of his broader team, Suleyman also hired former DeepMind colleagues Nando de Freitas and Trevor Back, who led the startup's health research team. However, each de Freitas and Back don’t work specifically for Microsoft's healthcare applications.
