Tech giants seek talent to speed up AI deployment
Earlier this week, Microsoft Corp. named artificial intelligence pioneer Mustafa Suleyman chief of its consumer AI business and hired most of the staff from his Inflection AI startup. A day before, Bloomberg reported that Alphabet Inc.’s Google was in talks to license its Gemini AI engine to Apple Inc.
The moves suggest that despite pouring billions of dollars into partnerships, investments and product development, Microsoft and Google are struggling to figure out how to capitalize on generative artificial intelligence. Neither company is moving fast enough to field consumer products that generate revenue and grab market share, and, despite their size and power, they remain vulnerable to being disrupted. Even as engineers labour to perfect the large language models undergirding the technology, the companies are forming alliances and scouring the world for talent and promising startups.
Forging a leading position in generative AI requires each of the tech giants to assemble various ingredients—computing power, top-of-the-line AI models, trustworthy and easy-to-use products and ways of getting them to people. None of the tech giants has all of the ingredients. Google, once the pioneer in large language models, keeps releasing products with worrying errors and biases. Microsoft got a head start with exclusive access to many of OpenAI’s ground-breaking models, but has never been skilled at building exciting consumer products besides video games. Apple is years behind in AI and planning to announce a comeback strategy in June, but it does have the iPhone and app store.
“Even large tech companies and cloud providers, with their vast resources, cannot innovate the entire generative AI ecosystem single handedly,” said Ido Caspi, a research analyst at Global X ETFs. “Firms must constantly be on the lookout for the best talent and technology to fill gaps in their portfolios.”
Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella isn’t satisfied with his team’s efforts to create consumer products, according to two people familiar with his thinking. Over the past year, the company has baked AI into the Bing search engine, Windows, Office and other products—creating various digital assistants under the new Copilot brand. Yet the new Bing has made few gains against search market leader Google, and the other products are works in progress. Though OpenAI has given Microsoft a first mover advantage, the startup is focused on the underlying technology not developing products for the software giant.
That’s why Nadella recruited Suleyman to be executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, along with Inflection AI co-founder Karén Simonyan, who will become chief scientist of the new unit. Nadella wanted someone to unify and oversee product development and believes he found that person in Suleyman, with whom he bonded during conversations about how AI could be tailored to individual users.
“Really all we’re trying to do is craft a true end-to-end product experience, so the user feels that there is a seamless, fluid, human-like conversational interaction,” Suleyman said in an interview Monday.
He likened the work to sculpting and said “that art requires you to know the real sweet spot of when a piece of technology is ready and how to dress the experience so that it has an essence and a character which is familiar and accessible and trusted.”