Microsoft has reportedly appointed Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, as head of its consumer AI division.
Bloomberg News reported on Monday (March 19) that the tech giant has also hired most of the staff of Mr. Suleiman's Inflexion AI startup, adding that his hire means that Microsoft's entire consumer artificial intelligence (AI) business will It points out that this is the first time it has been carried out under a single leader. .
As the report points out, Microsoft has had a “first-mover advantage” in the AI race thanks to its billion-dollar investment in OpenAI, but it still lags rival Google in the AI-powered search engine space. (DeepMind's parent).
“We want to make sure that this next wave is a wave where Microsoft can create really, really great products for consumers,” Suleiman said in an interview.
Inflection created the Pi chatbot, which is designed to mimic human emotional understanding and act as, in the company's words, a “kind and supportive companion.”
Although the company has raised $1.3 billion from investors including Microsoft and attracted 1 million daily active users, Suleiman told Bloomberg that the company has not found an effective business model.
While the company was trying to resolve the issue, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella asked Suleyman to join Microsoft, the report said.
“We want to bring real competition,” Nadella said in an interview with Bloomberg. “What's great is that when the media changes, you can once again play out what the browser means. What does the operating system even mean? What is the assistant? And that's the exciting part. – It's not about what happened, it's about what's going to happen – it's the rebirth of personal computing.”
PYMNTS recently investigated the controversy sparked by another Big Tech CEO, Amazon's Andy Jassy, who predicted last month that his company would reap billions of dollars in profits from artificial intelligence over the next few years. .
While some see this prediction as a potential turning point for the company, others question AI's realistic impact on revenue growth.
“AI was all the hype in the '80s, but it's completely died down,” Henry Schellhorn, a professor of mathematics at Claremont Graduate University, told PYMNTS in an interview.
“Today, AI has produced products that are much more impressive than they were in the 80s, such as voice recognition, image recognition, and ChatGPT, and they are hard to ignore.” These highly demanding products have enjoyed tremendous success over the past 20 years.”