Mustafa Suleyman, one of DeepMind’s co-founders, has left his startup Inflection AI to head up Microsoft’s new AI division.

According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Suleyman and Karén Simonyan—both Inflection co-founders—are joining Microsoft. Suleyman will be EVP and CEO of the newly formed Microsoft AI and report directly to Nadella. At Simonya will have the role of Chief Scientist and report to Suleyman.

Nadella says several more of Inflections’ staff are also joining the company:

Several members of the Inflection team have chosen to join Mustafa and Karén at Microsoft. They include some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers, and builders in the world. They have designed, led, launched, and co-authored many of the most important contributions in advancing AI over the last five years. I am excited for them to contribute their knowledge, talent, and expertise to our consumer AI research and product making.

Inflection said in a blog post that it will re-focus on its AI studio business and use Microsoft Azure to help it reach more users:

Our plan going forward is to lean into our AI studio business, where custom generative AI models are crafted, tested and fine tuned for commercial customers. Our success at training, tailoring and improving the performance of large AI models makes us uniquely well placed to be the AI platform for businesses around the world.

As part of this, we’re thrilled to announce that we will now host Inflection-2.5 on Microsoft Azure helping us get it into the hands of creators everywhere. We’ll also be ensuring it comes to other cloud hosting platforms in the near future. The API itself isn’t available today, but will be up and running very soon.

The company has appointed a new CEO to help lead the company through this transition:

We are delighted to welcome a new CEO, Sean White, who has decades of experience working at the cutting edge of technology, research and business. He is a visionary leader poised to take Inflection into this new era. Our third co-founder, Reid Hoffman will continue on our board and remains excited to take these next steps in building personal intelligence for everyone.

In a post on X, Suleyman voiced his confidence in Inflection’s future and its ability to continue to execute on its vision:

I’m excited to announce that today I’m joining @Microsoft as CEO of Microsoft AI. I’ll be leading all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing and Edge. My friend and longtime collaborator Karén Simonyan will be Chief Scientist, and several of our amazing teammates have chosen to join us.

@InflectionAI will continue on its mission under a new CEO, and look to reach more people than ever by making its API widely available to developers and businesses the world over.

It’s been an amazing journey, with so much more to come. Thank you to everyone for your support. Things really are just getting started.

— Mustafa Suleyman (@mustafasuleyma), March 19, 2024

Microsoft is clearly all-in on AI and has no intention of losing the early lead it has built.