Microsoft has announced a new London hub for its recently announced Consumer AI division. The company will be led by Jordan Hoffman, an AI scientist and engineer recently hired from Inflection AI, a high-profile AI startup that Microsoft invested in last year.
The news comes as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a new consumer AI division led by the founders of Inflection AI, including Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of AI company DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014. This was announced about three weeks after the announcement.
At the time, Nadella said that “several members of the Inflection team” were also joining Microsoft's new AI division (in fact, most of them did, according to a Bloomberg report). One of them is a former PhD student who joined DeepMind as a research scientist in 2020 after Suleiman founded the startup in 2022 and began poaching employees from DeepMind and Meta. It is now known that Mr. Hoffman joined the company and then jumped into refractive AI.
In a blog post today, Suleiman called Hofmann an “extraordinary AI scientist and engineer,” and Suleiman himself will report directly to Nadella in the US, with Hofmann heading up the new London division. .
Suleiman will begin a new recruitment drive “in the coming weeks and months” to find new AI talent to join Hoffman at Microsoft's Paddington office, where he will develop new language models and associated infrastructure and tools. He said he plans to develop it.
This is reflected in another recent announcement made in conjunction with the UK government that Microsoft plans to invest £2.5 billion ($3.15 billion) in the UK over the next three years, This includes expanding the footprint of the data center and “conducting multiple training sessions.” 1 million people will join for the AI economy. ”
The UK is considered one of the world's top countries for AI R&D investment after the US and China, and Google's DeepMind is also based in the UK capital, creating a tug-of-war for key talent between the two countries. There is a possibility that it will be seen. These are his two top contenders in the race for AI supremacy.
On a related note, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, was recently knighted for “contributions to artificial intelligence.”
TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment on the size of the UK AI hub, but the company said it was not disclosing any other details at this time.