Microsoft has hired Mustafa Suleiman, a well-known pioneer in artificial intelligence. Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind Institute, has warned that emerging technologies could cause “disasters of unimaginable proportions.”
Suleiman, 39, will report directly to Microsoft President Satya Nadella and will lead the company’s consumer AI division, the company said. He will lead his Microsoft efforts to build the Copilot AI chatbot and integrate AI capabilities into his Bing search engine and Edge browser.
“I have known Mustafa for several years as the founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, as a visionary product maker, and as a builder of pioneering teams pursuing bold missions. I have a lot of respect for him.” Nadella said in a blog post. Recruitment announcements will be made on Tuesday.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Mr. Suleyman led Inflection AI. Inflection AI is a startup co-founded by tech titan Reid and his colleague Karen Simonian, who have raised $1.5 billion to date. Most of his Inflection employees, including Simonyan, will join his Suleyman at Microsoft.
The latest hire is seen as a major coup for Microsoft, which aims to beat archrival Google and others in the race to develop advanced AI. Microsoft is the lead investor in OpenAI, best known for creating the ChatGPT chatbot and Sora text-to-video generation tool.
However, Suleiman has repeatedly urged caution and stressed the need for safe AI development.
In his 2023 book The Coming Wave, Suleiman writes that AI, synthetic biology, and other burgeoning technologies will allow “a wide variety of bad actors to create chaos, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.” He argued that it could cause
He also worries that AI could facilitate the spread of misinformation and cause economic havoc. In an interview with the FT last year, Suleiman said AI could transform white-collar work and create “a serious number of losers” in the job market who would be “very unhappy and very upset”. I warned you.
At the same time, Suleiman expressed optimism about the potential benefits of AI if properly leveraged, saying that such tools could help “herald a new dawn for humanity” and “improve our business.” “It could help us administer the world, treat diseases and fight battles,” he wrote.by A Wall Street Journal review of this book last fall.
Suleiman’s joining Microsoft is another blow to Google. Google acquired his former startup DeepMind in 2014, but has struggled to gain a foothold in the race to profit from AI.
Last month, Google suffered an embarrassing misfire when its Gemini chatbot started generating ahistorical or factually inaccurate photos of things like black Vikings and Native American founding fathers. The company was forced to disable Gemini’s image generation tools and issue an apology.
Google is said to be in talks with Apple about a deal to bring its Gemini chatbot to iPhones in the future.
The negotiations have already drawn criticism from antitrust watchdogs, who point out that Google and Apple face regulatory scrutiny over similar deals for online search.
