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Microsoft’s head of artificial intelligence Mustafa Suleyman poached a former colleague at Google Deepmind who built the capabilities to generate popular podcasts as rival companies compete to build lucrative applications from cutting-edge technology.
Suleyman, a British entrepreneur who co-founded Deep Mind in 2010, is two senior scientists Marco Tagliasacchi and Zalán Borsos, two senior scientists behind “Audio Overview,” which is part of Google’s AI research tool NoteBookLM. I hired. This feature allows users to convert text into audio with an attractive conversational podcast style.
The pair also worked on Astra, Deepmind’s upcoming AI agent. This allows you to answer questions in real time across video, audio and text.
Deepmind’s third employment, Matthias Minderer, will focus on visual ability development, or the ability of AI models to analyze images. Researchers will be participating in Microsoft’s new AI lab in Zurich.
The three men announced the move on Tuesday. Employer-savvy people will be trying to create interactive AI agents that can complete tasks from booking flights to managing calendars, so researchers will build the next generation of co-pilots He said it is essential for pushing.
“It’s an incredible team and will be an important hub (Microsoft AI) alongside the London office. Suleiman wrote to Linkedin.
“AI continues to be a changeable force, and audio plays an important role in shaping more natural, intuitive and immersive interactions,” writes Tagliasacchi on LinkedIn.
This move takes place in a fierce battle for talent between rival high-tech groups, for the best AI talent.
Suleyman left Google in 2022, working as a venture investor, and later created an inflection for an AI startup.
He joined Microsoft in March 2024, and was part of a contract that brought several members of Fechrection’s staff to the US technology giant. Suleyman hired members of Google Deepmind’s Health AI unit and prominent AI researchers from companies such as Nando de Freitas. Google also lost its top AI talent to its competitor Apple.
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Microsoft and Google are one of the companies that focus on creating agents through “multimodal” AI models, allowing you to analyze and understand audio, video, or image content.
Last year, OpenAI launched ChatGPT’s advanced audio mode. This allowed users to interact with AI in a more natural-sounding way, for example. Google’s Astra voice-powered AI agent Astra is scheduled to be released in 2025, but Amazon is about to introduce an AI model to its voice-powered digital assistant Alexa.
Google Deepmind declined to comment.
