Meta’s former executive Jason Taylor has joined Microsoft’s AI team to “build the next set of systems that will push the frontier of AI forward.”
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott announced in a LinkedIn post on Monday that Taylor will assume the positions of corporate vice president and deputy CTO. In his new role, Taylor will contribute to developing advanced systems designed to advance the frontiers of AI.
Taylor has worked with Meta for around 13 years and his tenure ended in 2022. His last position at the company was as a vice president for infrastructure. According to his LinkedIn profile, his responsibilities included overseeing AI, data, and privacy infrastructure, as well as managing the company’s server budgets. Additionally, from 2015 to 2017, Taylor served as the chair of the Open Compute Project Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting open-source designs in data centers.
Microsoft and OpenAI have been looking to build powerful AI systems with robust hardware. As per a report from The Information last month, the two partner companies have plans to build a $100 billion supercomputer, which is internally known as “Stargate” at the moment. This will most likely power future OpenAI models such as GPT 5 or perhaps even Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) an AI system capable of reasoning like humans.
However, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott has dismissed these rumors as “amusingly wrong” through his post on LinkedIn which pushed back most of the recent speculation.
Microsoft has been busy hiring industry experts from other tech giants such as Google DeepMind’s co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who now heads Microsoft’s new AI team as its CEO. Mustafa Suleyman also founded another AI startup in 2022 called Inflection AI, which he recently left to join Microsoft.
During Microsoft’s acquisition of Inflection AI talent, another scientist and engineer called Jordan Hoffman went on board on Microsoft’s team and is now in charge of the company’s London AI headquarters. Just like Suleyman, Hoffman has previously worked at Google DeepMind as well. Suleyman described Hoffman as an “exceptional AI scientist and engineer” in a blog post announcing the new London headquarters.