Co-founder of LinkedIn and Microsoft board member, Reid Hoffman shared that U.S. regulators were looking at Microsoft’s deal to poach Mustafa Suleyman along with most of his team from AI startup Inflection AI. During a conversation at Bloomberg’s tech conference held in San Francisco last Friday, Hoffman said that regulators were “asking questions just to understand” the mechanics of the deal.
Suleyman, who co-founded Google’s AI arm DeepMind, now heads Microsoft’s AI division. Last week, The Information revealed that he is overseeing work around Microsoft’s in-house AI model referred to as MAI-1.
Recently, major AI partnerships between Big Tech companies and startups have come under scrutiny from regulators. Last month, reports stated that the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority was investigating deals between Microsoft and French AI startup Mistral and hiring of former employees from Inflection AI, as well as Amazon’s investment in U.S. AI firm Anthropic.
When asked about Inflection AI, Hoffman said that the deal was “100% legal” and that regulators were asking “the right kind of questions” around it. “I think it’s great for both companies and it’s a pattern by which some future deals in technology will happen,” he said.
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Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI has also come under the scanner of EU antitrust. But the Satya Nadella-led company has largely avoided any action on grounds of not merging with or acquiring any portion of another company.
In December last year, Microsoft chief communications officer Frank Shaw defended the agreement with OpenAI saying, “While details of our agreement remain confidential, it is important to note that Microsoft does not own any portion of OpenAI and is simply entitled to share of profit distributions.”
