On Tuesday, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella announced Suleyman, along with the co-founder of his startup and other members of the team, would lead a new division at Microsoft.
It is rare for founders to leave their startups and bring staff to a big competitor. Suleyman, a foundational figure in the modern AI landscape, had raised more than $1.5 billion for his startup Inflection AI from a group of big-name investors, including Microsoft.
At Microsoft, Suleyman will oversee the AI products for the company’s consumer offerings, such as its Bing search engine and Windows.
“It’s been an amazing journey, with so much more to come,” he posted on X after the announcement.
In Suleyman, Microsoft is gaining one of the most visible figures in the AI community—albeit someone who has occasionally courted controversy and not always delivered hit products.
Suleyman shot to prominence as one of the three co-founders behind the U.K.-based AI research lab DeepMind. He started the company in 2010 with two friends, Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, in what he once described as a “quaint Regency-era office overlooking London’s Russell Square.”
In those early days, Suleyman was involved with the effective altruism community in London. They aim to help the world by funding causes that they believe will yield the most substantial possible returns. The divisive philosophy has long had an outsize influence among AI researchers, many of whom argue that more powerful AI systems could devastate humanity unless the industry aligns those systems with human values.
In his book “The Coming Wave,” published last year, Suleyman wrote that AI could put large numbers of people out of work and introduce new, harmful threats unless global leaders acted. In the past, he said his arguments were often dismissed by founders, CEOs and tech leaders who weren’t ready to confront the risks.
“Our species is not wired to truly grapple with transformation at this scale, let alone the potential that technology might fail us in this way,” Suleyman wrote.
DeepMind was snapped up by Google in 2014.
During his time at Google, Suleyman was sometimes a divisive figure. In 2019, he was stripped of some management responsibilities after complaints about how he treated staff.
In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal at the time, he said he “accepted feedback that, as a co-founder at DeepMind, I drove people too hard and at times, my management style was not constructive.”
Suleyman left Google in 2022.
After launching Inflection that year, the company developed its first consumer product, Pi, an AI assistant and companion. Pi was pitched as an AI counselor for personal advice and emotional guidance. Suleyman said Pi is kinder and friendlier than competing AI chatbots and less likely to seem to go rogue and answer questions in disturbing ways.
“Our focus is on building product that is useful and safe,” he said at a Wall Street Journal event last year.
Still, Pi didn’t catch on with enough consumers. Some analysts said the limited response to Pi shows that Suleyman doesn’t have a great record of building successful consumer AI products.
With Suleyman and others exiting, Inflection announced that under a new CEO, it is planning to pivot its business away from consumer products and toward services for enterprises. Its investors have been told they will be repaid over time by the proceeds of a licensing deal between Microsoft and Inflection, a person close to Inflection said. Forbes earlier reported the plans to pay investors.
Microsoft agreed to pay Inflection around $650 million as part of a licensing fee to resell the startup’s technology, said a person familiar with the discussions. The Information earlier reported that amount.
Microsoft’s Nadella was directly involved in recruiting Suleyman and his team. The two talked for weeks about the move, said people familiar with the discussions.
Generative AI technology is being used more by professionals and businesses than individual consumers. AI coding assistants—like Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot—have been embraced by programmers, for example, while a limited number of AI chatbots for consumers have taken off in popularity.
Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot has so far failed to make a dent in Google’s search market share.
Microsoft executives are hoping Suleyman and his team can reinvigorate the company’s consumer AI with fresh blood and ideas, said a person familiar with the matter.
Suleyman, for years, has been saying AI would bring in a new era of technology for everyone.
“I believe AI will be one of the most significant transformations we’ll witness this century,” he said in a November opinion article in the Journal.
