Mustafa Suleyman of Inflection AI Joins Microsoft

eclectic29 2 years ago |

This is really bad news for Microsoft culture. See https://archive.is/ZuvYu. Also from Wikipedia: In August 2019, Suleyman was placed on administrative leave following allegations of bullying employees.[17][18] The company hired an external lawyer to investigate, and shortly thereafter Suleyman left to take a VP role at parent company Google. An email circulated by DeepMind's leadership to staff after the story broke, as well as additional details published by Business Insider, said Suleyman's "management style fell short" of expected standards.[19][20].

whoevercares 2 years ago | |

Bill Gates used to call people idiots to their face all the time

stephencoyner 2 years ago | | |

What I’ve heard from people who have presented to him is he liked to say “that’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard”

At the same time, it seemed to draw results

whoevercares 2 years ago | | |

That’s damn true

belter 2 years ago | | |

Was that before or after getting into philanthropy foundations? :-)

freefaler 2 years ago |

He's not a technical guy, it's not like Ilya or Geohot. So it's not that important in the grand scheme of things...

From wikipedia:

After dropping out of university at 19, Suleyman helped start the Muslim Youth Helpline[6][7] with his university friend Mohammed Mamdani,[5] a telephone counselling service. The organization would later become one of the largest mental health support services for Muslims in the UK.[5]

Suleyman subsequently worked as a policy officer on human rights for Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, before going on to start Reos Partners, a ‘systemic change’ consultancy that uses methods from conflict resolution to navigate social problems. As a negotiator and facilitator, Mustafa worked for a wide range of clients such as the United Nations, the Dutch government, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.[8][9]

fakedang 2 years ago | |

To be fair, Sam Altman is no tech guy either. Although you could also retort that Microsoft have no need for another management guy other than Nadella.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 2 years ago | | |

Altman is not a deep PhD-level expert researcher in Machine Learning, but you could be a lot less technical than a Stanford CS dropout who built a tech co as his first swing. He's not exactly a management consultant LARPing being technical.

fakedang 2 years ago | | |

I think Suleyman is the same kind of guy. At least from what I've read on him, he seems to have some technical chops, even if he isn't a PhD expert.

bionhoward 2 years ago |

I can’t stand the way he tweets while ignoring the inflection customer noncompete nightmare. Maybe I’m just out of touch with corpo world as a solo founder guy but damn wtf is everyone at OpenAI/Microsoft/Anthropic/Inflection/Nvidia/Google smoking that they think it’s OK to claim fair use in learning from everyone then forbid others from using their technology to make AI/ML stuff ? Am I wrong to be continually shocked about these legal terms? IMHO, hypocrisy is a priori unreasonable.

If you read this and care about AI, then please consider switching to Mistral because their CEO actively deleted the customer noncompete and they are the only option with no such term.

ycsux 2 years ago | |

Will do that. I hate the way OpenAI can't say where their training data is from, even

blackhawkC17 2 years ago |

Feels off to jump ship shortly after raising $1.3 billion from investors (including Microsoft)..

https://inflection.ai/inflection-ai-announces-1-3-billion-of...

jmount 2 years ago |

> There is no franchise value in our industry and the work and product innovation we drive at this moment will define the next decade and beyond.

So no bird in hand, but the two in the bush are worth more?

gigel82 2 years ago |

Interesting, Mikhail Parakhin, CEO of Advertising, where Windows is reporting these days is also moving under the new org.

I wonder what Microsoft's plans are for Windows now that the whole thing reports to Copilot and Ads.

jgalt212 2 years ago | |

> I wonder what Microsoft's plans are for Windows now that the whole thing reports to Copilot and Ads.

oh, jeez.

ngomez 2 years ago | |

Not the whole thing: a lot of the Windows org chart is still under Rajesh Jha in Experiences + Devices, or scattered around Azure with Scott Guthrie. But they've already been pushing Windows Copilot and Bing Ads and widgets, so I imagine the plan is more of the same.

gigel82 2 years ago | | |

Mikhail reported to Rajesh Jha and I guess now he'll report to Mustafa.

Mikhail's official title is CEO of Advertising and the entire Windows Engineering org reports to him.

I just asked some MS friends who confirmed.

frabcus 2 years ago |

Inflection blog post about their new CEO, and their view of the change, and new API access to their model via Azure: https://inflection.ai/the-new-inflection

Also it is worth signing up to and trying out Pi, and talking to it about something emotional. It has a different tone both audio and what it says to other LLMs: https://pi.ai

API access to that does give more options for people making apps, it is different.

ChrisArchitect 2 years ago |