MANILA, Philippines – Microsoft on Tuesday, March 19, announced it had hired Google DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman to be the CEO of its team overseeing consumer-facing artificial intelligence (AI) products, such as Bing, Copilot, and Edge.

Suleyman will report directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and serve as executive vice president of Microsoft AI, joining the senior leadership team at Microsoft.

Additionally, Microsoft is also onboarding some of the employees of Inflection AI, which Suleyman also cofounded, with Karén Simonyan joining as chief scientist for the Microsoft AI initiative.

“I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker, and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions,” Nadella said of the developments in a blog post,

Nadella added, “Karén, a Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Inflection, is a renowned AI researcher and thought leader, who has led the development of some of the biggest AI breakthroughs over the past decade including AlphaZero.”

Suleyman confirmed the news on X, formerly Twitter.

Inflection AI meanwhile announced it would be led by a new CEO, Sean White. The announcement post also said the company would host Inflection-2.5 on Microsoft Azure.

Nadella, in his announcement post, said Microsoft 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. And today’s announcement further reinforces our partnership construct and principles.” – Rappler.com