DeepMind founder jumps to Microsoft to head AI products

Microsoft announced the hire of Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google subsidiary DeepMind [pictured], to lead all consumer artificial intelligence (AI) products and research, including the Copilot chatbot, Bing search engine, and Edge web browser, and to report directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Joining Microsoft with him are several teammates, as well as Karén Simonyan, co-founder of Inflection AI, who will serve as chief scientist.

Back in September 2010, Suleyman, along with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, founded DeepMind, which was early invested by Li Ka-shing, the founder of CK Hutchison. Four years later, they released the AI Go software AlphaGo. DeepMind was later acquired by Google, with a reported price of up to $500 million (approximately HKD 3.9 billion). Suleyman left DeepMind in 2022 and co-founded Inflection AI, which received a $1.3 billion investment led by Microsoft, its founder Bill Gates, and Nvidia in June last year.

In his latest book, The Coming Wave, Suleyman mentioned that AI technology can spread false information, replace countless workers, and even potentially destroy humanity, but it can also bring about tremendous changes in medical research. He believes that the rise of AI is inevitable, and companies and countries must cooperate to suppress AI, and also suggests that AI companies allocate 20% of R&D funds to projects such as security research.

GPT-5 expected to be released in the middle of the year

Foreign media Business Insider quoted two sources as saying that US firm OpenAI is expected to release GPT-5 in the middle of this year, and some corporate clients have even seen demonstrations, such as AI assistants performing tasks autonomously. The report pointed out that OpenAI is still training GPT-5 and will carry out “red team” security testing after the internal training is completed.

According to the report in the Seoul Economic Daily, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently told some South Korean startups, “The improvement in GPT-5’s capabilities will exceed people’s imagination.” He is not interested in anything else and is focused on building “general artificial intelligence” (AGI) with OpenAI, and even boasted on the social platform X (formerly known as Twitter): “This year is the most interesting year in human history.”