DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has joined two other high-profile industry figures in launching a new venture called Inflection AI.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is joining Suleyman on the venture.
“Reid and I are excited to announce that we are co-founding a new company, Inflection AI,” wrote Suleyman in a statement.
“Inflection will be an AI-first consumer products company, incubated at Greylock, with all the advantages and expertise that come from being part of one of the most storied venture capital firms in the world.”
Dr Karén Simonyan, another former DeepMind AI expert, will serve as Inflection AI’s chief scientist and its third co-founder.
“Karén is one of the most accomplished deep learning leaders of his generation. He completed his PhD at Oxford, where he designed VGGNet and then sold his first company to DeepMind,” continued Suleyman.
“He created and led the deep learning scaling team and played a key role in such breakthroughs as AlphaZero, AlphaFold, WaveNet, and BigGAN.”
Inflection AI will focus on machine learning and natural language processing.
“Recent advances in artificial intelligence promise to fundamentally redefine human-machine interaction,” explains Suleyman.
“We will soon have the ability to relay our thoughts and ideas to computers using the same natural, conversational language we use to communicate with people. Over time these new language capabilities will revolutionise what it means to have a digital experience.”
Interest in natural language processing is surging. This month, Microsoft completed its $19.7 billion acquisition of Siri voice recognition engine creator Nuance.
Suleyman departed Google in January 2022 following an eight-year stint at the company.
While at Google, Suleyman was placed on administrative leave following bullying allegations. During a podcast, he said that he “really screwed up” and was “very sorry about the impact that caused people and the hurt people felt.”
Suleyman joined venture capital firm Greylock after leaving Google.
“There are few people who are as visionary, knowledgeable and connected across the vast artificial intelligence landscape as Mustafa,” wrote Hoffman, a Greylock partner, in a post at the time.
“Mustafa has spent years thinking about how technological advances impact society, and he cares deeply about the ethics and governance supporting new AI systems.”
Inflection AI was incubated by Greylock. Suleyman and Hoffman will both remain venture partners at the company.
Suleyman promises that more details about Inflection AI’s product plans will be provided over the coming months.
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