Microsoft Corp. has hired Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder and chief executive of Inflection AI Inc., to lead its consumer artificial intelligence group.

Inflection AI co-founder Karén Simonyan is also joining the group as chief scientist. Bloomberg reported that most of the startup’s employees will move over to Microsoft as well. Inflection AI, in turn, will continue operating, it says, with a new CEO and a revised business model. 

Suleyman launched Inflection AI, a well-funded OpenAI competitor, in 2022 following a brief stint at Greylock Partners as a venture partner. The executive was earlier the head of applied AI at Google LLC’s DeepMind unit, which he had cofounded in 2010. DeepMind has developed several groundbreaking AI systems including AlphaFold, which can automate protein research tasks that historically took scientists years to perform.

Suleyman is joining Microsoft as the CEO of its Microsoft AI division. “I’ll be leading all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing and Edge,” he detailed in a post on X today. Bloomberg reported that the executive will also be responsible for productizing the AI models that Microsoft licenses from OpenAI.

Inflection AI, the startup Suleyman previously led as CEO, is one of OpenAI’s best-funded competitors. The company raised $1.3 billion last June through a Microsoft-led funding round. Microsoft is also the top backer of OpenAI, which it has provided with about $13 billion worth of cloud infrastructure and capital.

Inflection AI developed a series of large language models equipped with the ability to generate text, craft software code and perform related tasks. It used them to build a ChatGPT-like consumer chatbot called Pi. Suleyman told Bloomberg that Inflection AI amassed an installed base of more than one million active users but didn’t find an “effective business model.”

The company debuted its newest LLM, Inflection-2.5, less than two weeks ago. Inflection AI says that the model can nearly match the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4 across several task types. It was trained using ten times more computing power than the company’s first-generation LLM.

Inflection AI will continue operating under a newly appointed CEO, Sean White, who was earlier the Mozilla Foundation’s chief research and development officer. The company detailed in a blog post that it’s discontinuing its Pi chatbot. Going forward, it will focus on developing generative AI models for enterprises.

Inflection AI also detailed that it plans to make its Inflection-2.5 model available in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform “very soon.” The LLM will be accessible through an application programming interface, which will allow companies to integrate it into their internal workloads. Inflection-2.5 is also set to become available on other cloud platforms in the near future. 

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