Mustafa Suleyman

This March, Mustafa Suleyman left his startup Inflection AI to become the CEO of Microsoft AI, a newly-formed unit focused on the company’s consumer artificial intelligence research and products, like Copilot, Bing and Edge. Almost all of Inflection’s staff followed Suleyman to Microsoft from the startup that was valued at $4 billion. At the same time, Microsoft inked a $650 million deal with the startup to access its AI models.

Suleyman took a humanistic approach to technology with his strategy at Inflection. The company sought to create the first “emotionally intelligent” chatbot. In a TED Talk, a month after joining Microsoft, he described himself as someone “who’s always cared deeply about [technology’s] ethics.” Back in 2018, while at DeepMind—the Google-owned AI lab he co-founded—Suleyman signed an open letter endorsing a ban on lethal autonomous weapons.

Yet he has become embroiled in some ethical tangles of his own. He departed DeepMind in 2019 following accusations that he had bullied his staffers. He later apologized for his behavior. More recently, Microsoft’s arrangement with Suleyman and Inflection came under regulatory scrutiny, with the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority launching an investigation into whether it constituted a merger. On Sept. 4, the watchdog cleared the deal, saying that, while it qualified as a merger, it did not cause competition concerns. Microsoft and Inflection had said that they would cooperate with the watchdog. Microsoft added that it believes hiring talent promotes competition and shouldn’t be treated as a merger.

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