Mustafa Suleyman becomes Microsoft AI’s CEO: 7 things to know about the British AI pioneer

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO, Microsoft AI

Tech giant Microsoft has found a worthy alternative in Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to head its consumer artificial intelligence business along with hiring most of the startup’s staff. A few months back, a similar role was briefly accepted by OpenAI’s Sam Altman during his ousting fiasco as the CEO of the ChatGPT parent.

Either way, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has managed to get one of the foremost titans in the AI industry to run its AI business, as the technology giant leaves no stone unturned to compete against Google with its AI offerings.

Suleyman dons several hats, such as senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and is also a part of the steering committee of the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance.

Here are seven things you need to know about Suleyman, the new CEO of Microsoft AI.

1. He was named as one of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023 by Time Magazine.

2. Born in 1984 in London to a Syrian father who was a taxi driver and an English mother who worked as a nurse, Suleyman grew up in relative poverty.

3.  In what has become a niche for successful technocrats in the US, Suleyman is also a college dropout. Suleyman left Oxford University midway to venture into a non-profit telephone counselling service. Over the years, this organisation became one of the largest mental health support services in the UK for Muslims.

His social work hasn’t stopped since then, as he has worked on conflict resolution and social problems via his stints at the United Nations (UN), the World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature, and the Dutch government.

4. He co-founded his first AI startup DeepMind in 2010, which was acquired by Google in 2014. Post the acquisition, Suleyman worked at Google as VP of AI Products and AI Policy. Today, Google DeepMind has built its own generative AI model Gemini that is.

5. One of his ingenious work includes the application of DeepMind’s machine learning algorithms to reduce 40 percent energy consumption by Google’s data centres. He came up with a unique solution to cool down the energy-guzzling data centres by evaluating billions of possible combinations that operators could take action upon.

6. Suleyman started Inflection AI with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman in 2022, which went on to raise $1.5 billion so far and is valued at $4 billion. Some of its backers include Microsoft, NVIDIA, Bill Gates, and Hoffman himself.

7. In September 2023, his now New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling book The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma was published. So far, the book has been translated into 32 languages.