Microsoft has appointed Mustafa Sleiman as the head of the consumer-oriented Artificial Intelligence division in the company, Microsoft AI.
The company attracted most of its team from his startup company, Inflection AI, at a time when the tech giant is striving to compete fiercely with Google in the competitive artificial intelligence products market.
Mustafa Sleiman, a British-Syrian origin figure, founded the company “DeepMind” under Google. He will be responsible for reporting to CEO Satya Nadella and managing a set of projects, such as integrating their smart assistant into the Windows system and adding conversational elements to the Bing search engine.
Selecting Mustafa Sleiman will place Microsoft’s consumer artificial intelligence business under one management for the first time through the new Microsoft AI unit.
The new alliances are another major step for Microsoft in enhancing its capabilities and proprietary products in the field of artificial intelligence, away from its partnership with OpenAI. Microsoft invested $16 million last month in Mistral AI, a French competitor to OpenAI. Nadella informed Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, on Monday of Sleiman and his team joining Microsoft, as reported by the company.
“DeepMind” was founded in 2010 and was acquired by Google after four years. Sleiman was the company’s public face, engaging with officials and events on the promises of artificial intelligence and the necessary ethical controls around technology.
Sleiman left “DeepMind,” the subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, in 2022, and participated in creating another artificial intelligence project, Inflection AI.
Years ago, Nadella and Mustafa Sleiman met when Nadella delivered a lecture on his book Hit Refresh in London, and they exchanged contacts. Conversations about Sleiman joining Microsoft began in recent months.
