AIster · The model wars · M&A & deals
Microsoft hires Inflection's founders and staff
Microsoft gets Inflection's team and a licence to its models without an acquisition
Key facts
- Date
- 19 Mar 2024
- Era
- The model wars
- Interest
- M&A & deals
- Threads
- Labs & people
- Who
- Microsoft, Inflection AI
- People
- Mustafa Suleyman (CEO, Microsoft AI), Karén Simonyan (chief scientist)
- Amount
- About $650M, reported by Bloomberg on 21 Mar 2024
Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, the co-founders of Inflection AI, to run a new consumer unit called Microsoft AI, along with most of the startup's 70-person team. It agreed to pay Inflection about $650 million, mostly to license its models, without buying the company. Google used a similar licence-and-hire structure with Character.AI in August 2024.
Sources
- Microsoft, Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot, 2024-03-19
- Bloomberg, Microsoft to Pay Inflection AI $650 Million After Scooping Up Most of Staff, 2024-03-21