Mustafa Suleyman, who joined Microsoft in March to head the newly created Microsoft AI unit, has been building his team at the tech giant with talent from his former companies, including Google (GOOGL) DeepMind and Inflection AI. Suleyman’s latest hires included several former Google DeepMind staffers to join a new consumer health unit under Microsoft AI, the Financial Times first reported.
The London-based health team will include ex-Google DeepMind employees like Dominic King and Christopher Kelly. King previously headed Google DeepMind’s health unit, while Kelly acted as one of its research scientists. “The potential for artificial intelligence to address some of the world’s biggest healthcare challenges is advancing at an extraordinary pace,” said Kelly in a recent LinkedIn post announcing his new position at Microsoft.
“In our mission to inform, support and empower everyone with responsible A.I., health is a critical use case,” said Microsoft in a statement to Observer. “We continue to hire top talent in support of these efforts.”
Also recently joining Microsoft AI’s health unit were Bay Gross, the co-founder of the tech health care provider Cityblock Health, and Peter Hames, former CEO of the digital health company Big Health. “We’ll be forming a stellar team to pursue this important mission—more to come!” said Hames of the unit on LinkedIn.
Suleyman co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010 with his friend Demis Hassabis, who currently heads the Google-owned research lab. Hassabis won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for breakthroughs in protein structure design enabled by DeepMind’s AlphaFold project. He additionally heads Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary focused on using A.I. for drug discovery.
Suleyman joined Microsoft after the company struck a licensing deal with his startup Inflection AI. At Microsoft, Suleyman oversees the incorporation of A.I. in consumer products like Copilot, Bing and Edge. Microsoft is more focused on what consumers want while Google’s emphasis sways towards building “cool technology,” said Suleyman in a recent interview with The Verge.
Káren Simonyan, a former DeepMind researcher who co-founded Inflection AI with Suleyman in 2022, joined him at Microsoft along with much of the startup’s 70-person workforce. Nando de Freitas, a former senior A.I. director at Google DeepMind, was hired by Microsoft AI in September. And Trevor Black, a longtime Google DeepMind product manager, joined this month.
In April, Suleyman amped up his talent war with the London-based Google DeepMind when he opened a new Microsoft AI hub in the city. He appointed Jordan Hoffman, an A.I. researcher who formerly worked at both Inflection AI and Google DeepMind, to run the London office.
