Inflection AI Co-Founders and Team Join Microsoft to Accelerate Consumer AI Division's Growth

2024-03-20

Microsoft's ambitions in the field of AI have once again been demonstrated as it successfully attracts the co-founders of the highly anticipated AI startup, Inflection AI, Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan, along with several of their colleagues. This move undoubtedly marks an important step for the cloud giant, led by Satya Nadella, in actively attracting top talent. Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, injected new vitality into Google's AI efforts after its acquisition in 2014. Now, he will be responsible for Microsoft's newly established Consumer AI division - Microsoft AI, while Simonyan will join the team as Chief Scientist. Mustafa's official position at Microsoft is Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI, and he will report directly to CEO Nadella. It is reported that Microsoft plans to showcase its latest AI advancements at the upcoming event focusing on Microsoft Copilot, Windows, and Surface. This will undoubtedly further demonstrate Microsoft's leading position in the field of AI. For Microsoft, Inflection AI is not a stranger. The cloud giant led a $1.3 billion financing round for this startup less than a year ago. During the financing, Inflection AI stated that they were building the world's largest AI cluster with 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. Suleyman revealed in a tweet that he will also lead AI product and research work for Copilot, Bing, and Edge. This will undoubtedly further drive innovation and development for Microsoft in the field of AI. Nadella mentioned in a blog post, "Several members of the Inflection team have chosen to join Microsoft with Mustafa and Karen. They include some of the world's most outstanding AI engineers, researchers, and builders. Over the past five years, they have designed, led, launched, and co-authored many of the most important contributions to advancing AI." Inflection AI is one of the outstanding AI startups. It was co-founded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Suleyman in 2022, with the aim of developing AI systems capable of engaging in open-ended conversations, answering questions, and assisting in various tasks. Hoffman stated that all investors of Inflection AI will benefit from this transaction and look forward to greater growth opportunities in the future. At the same time, he revealed that Sean White, co-founder of Braingels, will take over as CEO of Inflection AI. In a blog post, Inflection AI stated that the company will shift its focus to the AI Studio business, which involves building and testing customer-generated AI models. The article also mentioned, "This re-emphasis on our API comes with some important changes for the company." Inflection AI will further host Inflection-2.5 on Microsoft Azure to better serve creators. The company also stated that it will ensure the API can be available on other cloud hosting platforms in the future. From this series of actions, it can be seen that Microsoft's layout in the field of AI has gone quite deep. Nadella previously extended an invitation to the co-founders of OpenAI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, in December last year, further demonstrating Microsoft's ambitions in the field of AI. Nadella stated today that although the company and the world are in the second year of the AI platform transformation, Microsoft "must ensure that we have the ability and capacity to innovate boldly." This statement undoubtedly injects more confidence and expectations into Microsoft's future development in the field of AI.