Microsoft has introduced a brand new London hub for its lately unveiled shopper AI division. Will probably be fronted by Jordan Hoffmann, an AI scientist and engineer Microsoft lately picked up from high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, which Microsoft invested in final yr.
The information comes some three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a brand new shopper AI division headed up by Inflection AI’s founders, which embrace Mustafa Suleyman — co-founder of Deepmind, the AI firm Google acquired in 2014.
On the time, Nadella stated that “a number of members of the Inflection staff” additionally joined Microsoft’s new AI unit (Bloomberg reported that most truly joined). We now know that a kind of was Hoffmann, a former PhD scholar who joined Deepmind as analysis scientist in 2020 earlier than leaping ship for Inflection AI, after Suleyman based the startup in 2022 and started poaching employees from Deepmind and Meta.
In a blog post today, Suleyman calls Hoffmann an “distinctive AI scientist and engineer,” and with Suleyman himself reporting on to Nadella within the U.S., Hoffmann will take cost of the brand new London unit.
Suleyman famous that they’ll launch new job postings within the “coming weeks and months” to search out recent AI expertise to affix Hoffmann at Microsoft’s Paddington workplace, the place they’ll develop new language fashions and related infrastructure and tooling.
This additionally feeds into one other current announcement made in conjunction with the U.Ok. Authorities, the place Microsoft stated it might make investments £2.5 billion ($3.15 billion) within the U.Ok. over the following three years, which is able to embrace increasing its datacentre footprint and practice “a couple of million individuals for the AI economic system.”
The U.Ok. is taken into account among the many top-tier countries globally when it comes to AI R&D funding, behind the U.S. and China, and with Google’s DeepMind additionally based mostly within the U.Ok. capital, we may very well be about to see a serious expertise tug-of-war between two of the frontrunners within the race for AI dominance.
On a associated word, Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis was lately awarded a knighthood for “companies to synthetic intelligence.”
TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for touch upon the dimensions of its U.Ok. AI hub, however the firm stated it wasn’t revealing some other particulars at current.