Microsoft’s new consumer AI division now has fresh headquarters in London which will be headed by Inflection AI’s former AI scientist and engineer Jordan Hoffman who has recently joined Microsoft. The Windows maker invested in the high-profile AI startup Inflection last year.
As mentioned earlier, Microsoft unveiled its consumer AI division only recently and it is headed by Inflection AI and Google DeepMind’s co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. DeepMind was acquired by Google back in 2014. The new London AI hub announcement comes only three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a new consumer AI division.
Once Inflection’s Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella only said that several members of the Inflection team had joined Microsoft without revealing names. But now we know that one of them was Jordan Hoffman, a one-time Ph.D. candidate who transitioned to a research scientist role at Deepmind in 2020, only to later join Inflection AI. This move came after Suleyman, who founded Inflection AI in 2022, began actively recruiting talent from Deepmind and Meta.
In a recent blog post, Mustafa Suleyman described Jordan Hoffmann as an “exceptional AI scientist and engineer.” Suleyman, who reports directly to Satya Nadella in the United States, announced Hoffmann would be spearheading the newly formed London division.
Suleyman also revealed plans to roll out new job listings in the “coming weeks and months.” The aim is to attract innovative AI professionals to collaborate with Hoffmann at Microsoft’s Paddington location. There, the team will focus on crafting novel language models, along with the necessary infrastructure and tools.
This development aligns with a recent joint announcement by Microsoft and the U.K. Government. In this declaration, Microsoft committed to a $3.15 billion investment in the United Kingdom over the next three years. This investment strategy includes plans to enlarge its data center operations and to train “more than one million people for the AI economy.”
The United Kingdom is recognized as one of the leading nations worldwide in AI research and development investment, ranking just after the U.S. and China. With Google’s DeepMind also situated in the capital of the U.K., the stage is set for a potential intense competition for top AI talent between two leading entities in the global AI innovation race.
