Microsoft AI London: Tech giant announces artificial intelligence hub for UK capital

Islington’s AI pioneer, Mustafa Suleman, has announced Microsoft AI London.
Andre Langlois
By Andre Langlois
Published 8th Apr 2024, 09:07 BST
Created by Dall-E AI with the prompt: "Image to represent a new AI hub in London."Created by Dall-E AI with the prompt: "Image to represent a new AI hub in London."
Created by Dall-E AI with the prompt: "Image to represent a new AI hub in London."

Tech giant Microsoft has announced it will create an artificial intelligence (AI) hub in London.

The announcement of Microsoft AI London was made by Mustafa Suleyman, who was last month appointed as CEO of Microsoft AI - and who is Londoner, having grown up in Caledonian Road, near what is now the King’s Cross tech district.

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He wrote in a blog: “Microsoft AI London will drive pioneering work to advance state-of-the-art language models and their supporting infrastructure, and to create world-class tooling for foundation models, collaborating closely with our AI teams across Microsoft and with our partners, including OpenAI.”

OpenAI is the company behind the market-leading ChatGPT and the Dall-E image-creation AI.

The new hub will be led by AI scientist and engineer Jordan Hoffmann, who was previously with Mr Suleyman’s Inflection AI and DeepMind.  Microsoft will shortly be posting job adverts to join his team.

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Created by Dall-E AI with the prompt: "Image to represent a new AI hub in London."Created by Dall-E AI with the prompt: "Image to represent a new AI hub in London."
Created by Dall-E AI with the prompt: "Image to represent a new AI hub in London."
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Mr Suleyman wrote: “As a British citizen, born and raised in London, I’m proud to have co-founded and built a cutting-edge AI business here. I’m deeply aware of the extraordinary talent pool and AI ecosystem in the UK, and I’m excited to make this commitment to the UK on behalf of Microsoft AI.

“I know – through my close work with thought leaders in the U.K. government, business community and academia – that the country is committed to advancing AI responsibly and with a safety-first commitment to drive investment, innovation and economic growth. Our decision to open this hub in the UK reflects this ambition.”

Mr Suleyman, from Islington, briefly worked for London mayor Ken Livingston as a policy officer. He would later co-found DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014, and Inflection AI, which he left to take up the post at Microsoft.

Created by Dall-E AI with the prompt: "Image to represent a new AI hub in London."Created by Dall-E AI with the prompt: "Image to represent a new AI hub in London."
Created by Dall-E AI with the prompt: "Image to represent a new AI hub in London."

Microsoft’s current presence in the UK includes the Microsoft Research Cambridge lab, which carries out AI, cloud and productivity work.

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The company recently announced a £2.5 billion investment to “upskill the UK workforce for the AI era”.

It has commited to bringing 20,000 of the “most advanced” GPUs (graphics processing units) to the country by 2026.

Related topics:MicrosoftLondonArtificial IntelligenceWorkEngineersTalentBenefitsKing's CrossChatGPTCambridgeGovernment

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