Microsoft Raids Google's DeepMind AI Unit With Promise of Less Bureaucracy

DeepMind founder Mustafa Suleyman says Microsoft now feels more like a startup workplace

- Sebastian Herrera & Katherine Blunt

Microsoft hired one of the founders of Google's DeepMind to help it catch up in the AI race. Now, Mustafa Suleyman is raiding his former shop for top talent.

Mirroring a tactic from Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Suleyman has been personally calling recruits, pitching them on the idea that the fledgling AI division Microsoft created last year is a nimbler, more startup-like workplace than DeepMind has become under Google's ownership, according to people familiar with the matter.

Suleyman, head of Microsoft AI, has offered heftier pay and the opportunity to help turn Microsoft's Copilot chatbot into a more formidable competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT, the people said.

The company has poached at least two dozen executives and other employees from Google in the last several months, with most having worked at DeepMind, the people said. This has included Adam Sadovsky, a former Google DeepMind distinguished engineer, and Amar Subramanya, formerly vice president of engineering at Google.

Suleyman's recruitment offensive is the latest salvo in the increasingly frenzied battle for AI talent. Multitrillion-dollar Silicon Valley giants are jousting with startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic over the limited pool of engineers who understand the inner workings of so-called deep learning models. Individual pay packages have run into nine figures, and companies are spending tens of billions more on data centers in the quest to be the first to build a machine that exhibits humanlike intelligence.