Microsoft appointed Mustafa Suleiman as the CEO of the personal artificial intelligence company "Inflection AI," within its Microsoft AI division. This move adds an influential figure in the world of artificial intelligence to bolster the company's position in the field. Suleiman, a British of Syrian descent born in 1984, will lead all consumer artificial intelligence products and research for Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant series, as well as the Bing search engine and Edge browser.
Who is Suleiman? Suleiman co-founded DeepMind (now owned by Alphabet and part of Google) with his friend Demis Hassabis in 2010. He became a pioneer in applying artificial intelligence at DeepMind, according to a report by "Asharq Al-Awsat" citing "Fast Company." In Google in 2019, Suleiman was impressed by the research breakthroughs in building and training generative artificial intelligence systems and saw them as the beginnings of a completely new "conversational" interface between humans and computers. He joined the natural language research team in 2020, where he stayed for nearly two years. His main contribution to Google's work with large language models was developing a way to "ground" model outputs in facts and avoid "hallucination."
Suleiman wanted Google to incorporate conversational AI into search but became frustrated with the company's hesitance to integrate conversational AI into its products, including search, during 2020 and 2021. This frustration led to his departure in January 2022, just weeks after the launch of ChatGPT, prompting him to consider starting his own company. He stated to "Fast Company": "I was very frustrated, and I thought, okay, I'll do this because I believe the future of all interfaces relies on conversation."
