Microsoft names DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as CEO of AI unit

Microsoft said Tuesday it has hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of artificial intelligence startup DeepMind that Google acquired in 2014, to lead Copilot AI initiatives. Suleyman will become an executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella.

Inside Google, DeepMind became a leader in AI research, receiving placement for its work in the journal Nature and extensive media attention. The traction caught the eye of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who sought to counter Google’s rise with the creation of a nonprofit AI lab, OpenAI.

Suleyman left Google parent Alphabet in 2022 and became co-founder and CEO of startup Inflection AI. Karén Simonyan, a co-founder of Inflection and its chief scientist, is joining Microsoft as chief scientist for Microsoft AI, alongside several of the startup’s employees, Nadella wrote in a Microsoft memo.

The new Microsoft AI group will work on Copilot, which appears in Bing, Windows and other Microsoft products. Consumer AI products and research will also fall under the group.

“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 wrote.

Demis Hassabis, another co-founder of DeepMind, remains at Google DeepMind. Google is one of Microsoft’s largest competitors in AI but has faced a barrage of issues surrounding its Gemini chatbot and image-generation AI.

Google pulled the image-generation feature tool last month following a string of controversies, including historical inaccuracies and contentious responses.

“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that,” Hassabis said last month. “We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks.” He added that the product was not “working the way we intended.”

WATCH: We’ve hit ‘peak hype’ of the AI revolution, says DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman