Who is Microsoft AI's new CEO?

Welcome to the 23rd issue of the Tech Wrap-Up Europe newsletter.

Every few weeks, we'll be sharing interesting stories and expert insights from LinkedIn members.?

In this issue, Sam Shead, LinkedIn's tech and innovation editor for the UK and Europe, looks at Mustafa Suleyman 's journey from co-founding the DeepMind AI lab in London to becoming the CEO of Microsoft AI .?

We also talk to the inventor of Pokémon Go about the new 苹果 Vision Pro headset and look at the intensifying battle for top AI talent in Europe.

微软 , LinkedIn 's parent company, has a new AI CEO: Mustafa Suleyman.?

Reporting directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella , Suleyman said he will be responsible for leading all consumer AI products and research, including Copilot, Bing and Edge.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Suleyman is the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg . The startup's mission was quite simply to "solve intelligence" and use that to solve everything else.?

After raising money from the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the DeepMind founders sold their London-headquartered business to 谷歌 in 2014 for a sum reported to be around ￡400m (€467m).?

Suleyman led DeepMind's "applied AI" team and focused on finding new uses for the company's technology in areas such as healthcare and energy. He also oversaw DeepMind’s work on AI ethics and that involved trying to set up an independent board to oversee the lab’s research, which could one day have a huge impact on humanity.?

In August 2019, Suleyman announced on X that he was stepping away from DeepMind, adding that he needed a “break to recharge”. Less than half a year later, in December 2019, he announced that he was officially leaving the AI lab to join Google as VP of AI product management and AI policy.

Known to many as "Moose", Suleyman left Google in January 2022 to become a venture capitalist at Silicon Valley firm Greylock , alongside LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman , who sits on Microsoft's board.?

The duo launched a new startup together in March 2022 called Inflection AI and raised more than $1.5bn (€1.4bn) for the business from investors including 英伟达 and Microsoft.

The startup developed a large language model, which it used to power a chatbot called Pi, which had around 1 million daily active users at the start of March. Users appreciated Pi as it was more empathetic and personal than some of the other well-known AIs.

“Even at the bigger tech companies, there’s a relatively small number of people actually building these models,” Suleyman told me in an interview for CNBC when Inflection launched. “One of the advantages of doing this in a startup is that we can go much faster and be more dynamic.”

He added: “My experience of building many, many teams over the last 15 years is that there is this golden moment when you really have a very close-knit, small-focused team. I’m going to try and preserve that for as long as possible.”

Several other members of the Inflection team are joining Microsoft AI, including Karén Simonyan , who will be the division's chief scientist.

Meanwhile, tech veteran Sean White , who was previously chief research and development officer at Mozilla , has been appointed as Inflection's new CEO.?

"Under Sean’s leadership, Inflection will continue on its mission and will reach more people than ever by making its API widely available to developers and businesses all over the world," Hoffman wrote on LinkedIn.?

What does Suleyman bring to Microsoft? Join the conversation in the comments.

Competition for the top artificial intelligence researchers and engineers is heating up in Europe.

Fast-growing overseas AI startups including OpenAI , Anthropic and Cohere all opened offices in Europe last year, putting pressure on tech firms already trying to attract and keep hold of talent in the region.?

One of the most notable AI labs in Europe is DeepMind and the company has snapped up many of the leading AI scientists across the continent over the last decade or so.

However, there have been some notable exits recently: co-founder Suleyman left to set up Inflection; research scientist Arthur Mensch left to set up Mistral AI and Phil Blunsom , a lead researcher at DeepMind for seven years, left to join Cohere.?

Executive search firm Avery Fairbank told Reuters there has been an "exponential increase" in pay for C-suite staff at AI companies in the UK following the arrival of foreign AI giants. Charlie Fairbank , the firm's managing director, said execs on base salaries of around ￡350,000 have seen their pay packets rise by up to ￡100,000.?

The sizeable salaries in AI have priced many academics out of universities in the US and Europe, with top AI researchers at the likes of the 英国牛津大学 and the 英国剑桥大学 joining firms like DeepMind and Meta , where they stand to earn significantly more.?

AI consultant Catherine Breslin , who used to work on the 亚马逊 Alexa team, wrote on LinkedIn that AI research has moved from academia to industry over the past decade.?

"The rapid commercialisation of AI is behind this trend, as companies are hiring fast to keep up," she says. "Industry positions tend to have higher salaries and easier access to the hefty computing power that AI research needs today. This was already the case a few years ago, and the gap is still widening."

Who remembers Pokémon Go?

The augmented reality mobile game was a huge hit in 2016 and there was a time when it felt like all of us were quietly catching Pokémon on the down low as we moved from A to B.?

While millions of people still play, the game's popularity has diminished and user numbers are way down since that early peak.

Could the Apple Vision Pro headset help to reignite the game's fortunes??Some people think Pokémon Go and the Vision Pro could be a perfect match.

"This kind of real-life Pokémon simulation would be a lot of fun," one Reddit user wrote.

But John Hanke , the creator of Pokémon Go, isn't racing to launch the game on Apple's headset just yet.?

Speaking to LinkedIn News Europe, the former Google Maps engineer who is now the CEO of Niantic, Inc. , said that the device isn't quite right for Pokémon Go.

While he thinks it's a technological "marvel" and the best version of an AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) headset, one of its main limitations is that it's not designed for outdoor use.?

If people were walking around, throwing virtual poké balls on the street, they would really be pushing the envelope of what the Vision Pro is designed to do, he said. The device has a battery life of two and a half hours.

"The risk for them [Apple] is they get stuck in this sort of local maxima of making a great indoor headset," says Hanke.

He adds: "The real goal I think is glasses that you can wear in the course of your normal life that would help you do stuff...give you directions, information... help you be a better human being."

"Apart from that, we don't have infinite resources," Hanke said. "We have to choose where to put our developers to work."?

Beyond Pokémon Go, Hanke's still trying to determine whether to launch other games on the Vision Pro. Some third-party developers are building Vision Pro games on Niantic's Lightship platform, but the company isn't currently building any games itself.?

If Niantic did make a Vision Pro, it would purely be "to learn," Hanke said, noting that it's not really viable to make money from the Vision Pro at the moment due to the relatively small number of headsets that have been sold.?

The current cost ($3,499; €3,236; ￡2,778) means Vision Pro is too expensive for many people. and some of the early adopters have been returning their devices.

Mapping the career of Pokémon Go's creator

Hanke grew up making games in the 1980s on his 8-bit computer and moved to Silicon Valley in the 1990s to help start a gaming company.

"We made a massively multiplayer online game, one of the very first for the internet," he said. "It was called Meridian 59. There's still vestiges of it out on the web."?

The game, which went live in 1994, allowed people to explore a virtual world with their 3D avatar alongside hundreds of other people who were all playing on the same server, which Hanke says was always up and running.

"The sun would come up and go down, people would come and go," he explains.?

The startup was acquired by gaming firm 3DO , which was set up by Trip Hawkins , the founder of 美国艺电公司 and one of Hanke's heroes.?

After a few years with 3DO, Hanke started and sold another game company called Big Network, which made "multiplayer casual Internet games".

He then "got connected with some folks [who were] building a sort of hybrid of a map and a video game".

Together with this group, Hanke founded Keyhole, a company that made some of the core Google Earth technology.?

"It was a dream come true for me because I'd grown up loving maps, perusing National Geographic, letting my mind run wild and exploring maps of different places in the world," says Hanke.?"So this idea of making a map that was powered by 3D accelerated graphics and had all this cool satellite imagery powering it so you could fly down to Africa or Asia or wherever you wanted to go was a blast."

Keyhole "got pretty far" with the technology and then the company was acquired by Google in 2004, which helped the team to "take it the rest of the way."

Hanke spent seven to eight years at Google building out Google Geo, Google Earth and Google Street View.?

The origins of Niantic

He and a few other started Niantic while at Google as "a little skunkworks thing" because he was interested in wearable computing.

"After having kids, I got really focused on how to use technology that can help us enjoy being out in the world," he says, noting that he was dealing with the "screen time issue" with his children around the same time.

"I gave them a computer from a young age and encouraged them to use them and play games on them and learn how to programme them. But in the interim between when I was a kid and when I had kids, these things have become so compelling and so good at delivering these escapist experiences."

As a result, Hanke was struggling to get his kids to go out.

"That really became the mission of Niantic," he says. "How can we use tech to get people to explore the world and do stuff together in person? And that remains our mission today" we promote exploration, exercise and real-world social. I think it's more relevant than ever. The problem has only gotten worse."

It got much worse during the Covid pandemic, Hanke says, adding that it isolated certain trends associated with excessive screen time and amplified them by 100x.

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