Microsoft has announced a new center in London for its recently launched consumer AI division. It will be headed by Jordan Hoffmanan AI scientist and engineer who Microsoft recently picked up from a high-profile AI startup. Tipping AIwhich Microsoft invested in last year..
The news comes about three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced new consumer AI division led by the founders of Inflection AI, including Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Deepmind, the artificial intelligence company. Google acquired in 2014.
At the time, Nadella said that “several members of the Inflection team” also joined Microsoft’s new AI unit (Bloomberg reported that the majority really joined). We now know that one of them was Hoffmann, a former PhD student who joined Deepmind as a research scientist in 2020 before jumping ship for Inflection AI, after Suleyman founded the startup in 2022 and started poaching Deepmind and Meta employees.
in a today’s blog postSuleyman calls Hoffmann an “exceptional AI scientist and engineer,” and as Suleyman himself reports directly to Nadella in the US, Hoffmann will take charge of the new London unit.
Suleyman noted that they will be launching new job openings in the “coming weeks and months” to find new AI talent to join Hoffmann at Microsoft’s Paddington office, where they will develop new language models and associated infrastructure and tools.
This also fuels another recent joint announcement with the UK Government, where Microsoft said it would invest £2.5 billion ($3.15 billion) in the UK over the next three years, which will include expanding its data center footprint and training “more than a million people for the AI economy.”
The United Kingdom is considered among the top tier countries worldwide In terms of investment in AI R&D, behind the US and China, and with Google’s DeepMind also based in the UK capital, we could be about to see a major talent tug-of-war between the two. of the pioneers in the race for AI dominance.
On a related note, Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis was recently awarded knighthood for “artificial intelligence services”.
TechCrunch approached Microsoft for comment on the scale of its UK AI center, but the company said it would not reveal any other details at this time.