Microsoft AI will get a brand new London hub fronted by former Inflection and Deepmind scientist Jordan Hoffmann

Microsoft has introduced a brand new London hub for its lately unveiled shopper AI division. Will probably be fronted by Jordan Hoffmann, an AI scientist and engineer Microsoft lately picked up from high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, which Microsoft invested in last year.

The information comes some three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a new consumer AI division headed up by Inflection AI’s founders, which embody Mustafa Suleyman — co-founder of Deepmind, the AI firm Google acquired in 2014.

On the time, Nadella mentioned that “several members of the Inflection team” also joined Microsoft’s new AI unit (Bloomberg reported that most truly joined). We now know that a kind of was Hoffmann, a former PhD pupil who joined Deepmind as analysis scientist in 2020 earlier than leaping ship for Inflection AI, after Suleyman based the startup in 2022 and started poaching employees from Deepmind and Meta.

In a blog post today, Suleyman calls Hoffmann an “exceptional AI scientist and engineer,” and with Suleyman himself reporting on to Nadella within the U.S., Hoffmann will take cost of the brand new London unit.

Suleyman famous that they are going to launch new job postings within the “coming weeks and months” to seek out contemporary AI expertise to affix Hoffmann at Microsoft’s Paddington workplace, the place they are going to develop new language fashions and related infrastructure and tooling.

This additionally feeds into one other latest announcement made in conjunction with the U.Ok. Authorities, the place Microsoft mentioned it could make investments £2.5 billion ($3.15 billion) within the U.Ok. over the following three years, which is able to embody increasing its datacentre footprint and prepare “more than one million people for the AI economy.”

The U.Ok. is taken into account among the many top-tier countries globally when it comes to AI R&D funding, behind the U.S. and China, and with Google’s DeepMind additionally based mostly within the U.Ok. capital, we may very well be about to see a significant expertise tug-of-war between two of the frontrunners within the race for AI dominance.

On a associated notice, Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis was lately awarded a knighthood for “services to artificial intelligence.”

TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for touch upon the size of its U.Ok. AI hub, however the firm mentioned it wasn’t revealing every other particulars at current.