Microsoft has announced a new center in London for its recently unveiled consumer AI division. He will be presented by Jordan Hoffman, an AI scientist and engineer recently selected by Microsoft from high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, in which Microsoft invested last year.
The news comes about three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a new consumer AI division headed by Inflection AI founders, including Mustafa Suleiman — co-founder of Deepmind, the AI company acquired by Google in 2014.
At the time, Nadella said that “several members of the Inflection team” had also joined Microsoft's new AI unit (Bloomberg reported that most had already joined). We now know that one of those was Hoffman, a former PhD student who joined Deepmind as a research scientist in 2020 before jumping to Inflection AI, after Solomon founded the startup in 2022 and began poaching employees from Deepmind and Meta.
In today's blog post, Solomon described Hoffman as an “exceptional AI scientist and engineer,” and with Solomon himself reporting directly to Nadella in the US, Hoffman will take charge of the new London unit.
Solomon noted that they will launch new job advertisements in the “coming weeks and months” to find new AI talent to join Hoffman in Microsoft's Paddington office, where they will develop new language models and associated infrastructure and tools.
This also feeds into another recent announcement made jointly with the UK government, with Microsoft saying it will invest £2.5 billion ($3.15 billion) in the UK over the next three years, which will include scaling up its data center and training “more than one.” . One million people for the AI economy.”
The UK is among the top countries globally in terms of investment in AI R&D, behind the US and China, and with Google's DeepMind also based in the UK capital, we could be about to see a tug of war between top talent. Two front runners in the race for AI dominance.
In a related context, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, recently received a knighthood for “services to artificial intelligence.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Microsoft for comment on the size of its AI center in the UK, but the company said it is not revealing any further details at this time.
