Mustafa Suleyman
CEO of Microsoft AI, co-founder of DeepMind and later Inflection AI.
Mustafa Suleyman co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010 alongside Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, stayed after Google bought it, and later left to start Inflection AI. In 2024 Microsoft hired him and most of Inflection’s team, and he now runs Microsoft AI, the division behind Copilot and the company’s own MAI models.
His current position is worth knowing because it differs from the rest of the industry. Rather than chasing the largest, most capable model, Suleyman argues for small models trained for single fields and a routing layer that sends hard cases elsewhere. Part of that is cost. Part of it is that Microsoft would rather not depend permanently on OpenAI, despite owning a large stake in it.