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Microsoft chooses London as the hub to drive its AI advancements
Microsoft Corp. today said it’s looking at the “enormous pool of AI talent” in London where it will open a major new AI hub.
This builds upon the £2.5 billion ($3.15 billion) Microsoft said last year that it will invest in the U.K. over three years. The investment will include a new data center in London and various training schemes to bring about 1 million Brits into the AI sector through training. The U.K. already has about 50,000 people working in AI, contributing about $4 billion to the country’s economy.
Today’s news comes shortly after Microsoft announced the opening of its consumer artificial intelligence group, which will be led by the co-founder and chief executive of Inflection AI Inc., Mustafa Suleyman. Suleyman, who is British, is also co-founder and former head of applied AI at DeepMind, now owned by Google LLC.
“Microsoft AI London will drive pioneering work to advance state-of-the-art language models and their supporting infrastructure, and to create world-class tooling for foundation models, collaborating closely with our AI teams across Microsoft and with our partners, including OpenAI,” Suleyman said in a blog post.
He talked about the U.K.’s focus on “AI safety,” stating that the country is “committed to advancing AI responsibly and with a safety-first commitment to drive investment, innovation and economic growth.” Only last week, the U.S. and U.K. governments signed an agreement to collaborate on AI regarding advances and the risks they might pose, coming at a time when fears over AI are at an all-time peak.
The London hub will be headed by AI scientist and engineer Jordan Hoffmann, a Harvard Ph.D. who worked at DeepMind and later moved to Inflection after Suleyman started the company in 2022.
Suleyman said the London plan starts now, with job openings to be posted in the coming weeks. It’s not certain how many jobs this will create, but with Microsoft and Open AI partnering, the company looks set potentially to lead the world in AI in 2024. Since the partnership was formed, Microsoft has become the world’s most valuable listed company, with more than $3 trillion in market value.
