Mustafa Suleyman
Mustafa Suleyman, CBE is the CEO of Microsoft AI and Cofounder of DeepMind and Inflection AI with over 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur, technologist, and leader in artificial intelligence. He serves as Executive Vice President (EVP) and CEO of Microsoft’s newly created consumer AI unit, focusing on advancing Copilot and other consumer AI products.
Additionally, he serves as a Non-Executive Director at The Economist and as a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. Read Microsoft taps DeepMind co-founder Suleyman to spearhead consumer AI push.
Since joining Microsoft in March 2024, Mustafa has led the transformation of the company’s consumer AI strategy, overseeing Copilot, Bing, Edge, and other AI products. Under his leadership, Microsoft AI has focused on developing AI companions that create personalized digital experiences, with recent innovations including Copilot Mode in Edge and advanced memory and assistive capabilities. He has been instrumental in recruiting top AI talent, including hiring former Google DeepMind scientists Marco Tagliasacchi and Zalán Borsos, who developed the AI podcasting tool “Audio Overviews,” as well as Dominic King and Christopher Kelly for Microsoft’s consumer AI health division. Read Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says AI companions will create a new class of digital experience.
Before Microsoft, Mustafa cofounded Inflection AI in March 2022 with Reid Hoffman and Karén Simonyan, where he served as CEO until March 2024. The company developed Pi (Personal Intelligence), a conversational AI chatbot designed to provide emotional support and personalized interactions, and raised $225 million in its first funding round. The startup also created world-leading models, including Inflection-2.5, establishing itself as a significant player in the consumer AI space. Watch Mustafa Suleyman: The True Superhero of AI Activism.
Mustafa is perhaps best known as the Cofounder of DeepMind Technologies, the pioneering AI research company he established in 2010 with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg. As Chief Product Officer and later Head of Applied AI, he played a crucial role in DeepMind’s groundbreaking achievements, including the development of AlphaGo, which defeated the world’s strongest Go player in 2016.
Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for a reported £400 million, marking the company’s largest acquisition in Europe to date. During his tenure, Mustafa launched DeepMind Health at the Royal Society of Medicine in 2016, developing AI applications for healthcare, including collaborations with Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and research on breast cancer detection. He also led the effort to reduce Google’s data center cooling energy consumption by 40% using DeepMind’s machine learning algorithms. Read DeepMind is using AI to pinpoint the causes of genetic disease and DeepMind’s health team joins Google Health.
From January 2020 to January 2022, Mustafa served as VP of AI Product Management & AI Policy at Google, where he was responsible for integrating AI across Google’s product ecosystem and developing policy frameworks for responsible AI deployment. He also served as a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners from 2022 to 2024, advising early-stage companies and investing in AI startups. Read Who is Mustafa Suleyman? DeepMind Founder Turned AI CEO.
Mustafa earned his undergraduate education at Mansfield College, Oxford University, where he studied philosophy and theology before dropping out at age 19 in 2001. Despite leaving Oxford early, his philosophical training provided him with the systematic thinking skills that would later prove invaluable in his technology career. His departure from university was motivated by a desire to make an immediate social impact, leading him to co-establish the Muslim Youth Helpline with Mohammed Mamdani, which became one of the largest mental health support services in the UK.
His early career included working as a policy officer on human rights for Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, before founding Reos Partners in 2007. This systemic change consultancy used conflict resolution methods to address social problems, with clients including the United Nations, the Dutch government, and the World Wide Fund for Nature. These experiences in social entrepreneurship and policy work laid the foundation for his later focus on ethical AI development.
Since June 2019, Mustafa has served as a Non-Executive Director on the board of The Economist Group, which publishes The Economist newspaper. He is also a founding co-chair of the Partnership on AI, an organization that includes representatives from Amazon, Apple, DeepMind, Meta, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, focused on formulating best practices for AI technologies and advancing public understanding of AI.
Additionally, he serves as a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, working on the geostrategic challenges of future AI systems, and is a member of the Steering Committee of the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance.
In September 2023, Mustafa published The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, which became a New York Times bestseller. The book examines the transformative impact of AI and synthetic biology on society and has been praised by Bill Gates as his “favorite book on AI”. The book won the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award and was a finalist for the Porchlight Business Book Award and the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award.
It was also selected as a Best Book of the Year by CNN, The Economist, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times. Read The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, My favorite book on AI, and Bill Gates: This is ‘one of the most important books on AI ever written’.
Mustafa was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours for his services to the UK technology industry. He has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence in both 2023 and 2024. In 2019, he also received the Silicon Valley Visionary Award. Watch What is an AI anyway?
Born in 1984 in London to a Syrian taxi driver father and English nurse mother, Mustafa grew up in North London with two younger brothers. He attended Thornhill Primary School in Islington and Queen Elizabeth’s School in Barnet, where he demonstrated early entrepreneurial skills by selling candy wholesale to other students. Through his best friend, he met Demis Hassabis, the future cofounder of DeepMind, and his younger brother, beginning a relationship that would later transform the AI industry. Mustafa currently lives in Palo Alto, California.
Watch Mustafa Suleyman on Whose Jobs Are Safe-and Whose Aren’t, Could computers become conscious? | Beyond the Bio: Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman: Our AI Doctor Outperforms Human Diagnosticians, and How our time online is changing (ft. CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman).
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