Microsoft poaches more Google DeepMind AI talent as it beefs up Copilot

• Mustafa Suleyman's Microsoft artificial intelligence organization has been picking up talent from Google DeepMind, where he spent several years.
• Google's Gemini assistant rivals Microsoft's Copilot for consumers.
• Meta and Google have also been paying up for experts in the field.

Microsoft has hired around two dozen employees from Alphabet's Google DeepMind artificial intelligence research lab in recent months, a person familiar with the recruiting told CNBC.

The person asked not to be named in order to discuss internal matters.

On Tuesday, Amar Subramanya, who worked at Google for 16 years, most recently as a vice president of engineering developing the Gemini assistant, said on LinkedIn that he has joined Microsoft AI as a corporate vice president.

The Microsoft group works on the consumer-oriented Copilot assistant, as well as the Bing search engine.

In June, Adam Sadovsky, with nearly 18 years of experience at Google, most recently as a distinguished software engineer and senior director at DeepMind, decamped to Microsoft. He's now a corporate vice president at Microsoft AI.

Earlier this month, Sonal Gupta, a Google DeepMind engineering lead, said on her LinkedIn profile that she's now a member of technical staff on Suleyman's Microsoft AI team. Jonas Rothfuss took a technical staff role at Microsoft AI in May after spending a year as a research scientist at Google DeepMind.

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The movement of talent comes as tech megacaps have shelled out for AI experts.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last month that Meta offered the startup's employees $100 million signing bonuses. Meta succeeded in hiring Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Google has hired the CEO and other employees of AI coding startup Windsurf in a $2.4 billion deal.

Microsoft's new hires are joining the software company's AI group led by CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who reports to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Suleyman was a co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014. He left Google to run AI startup Inflection in 2022, and last year he became a Microsoft executive, bringing several of the startup's employees with him.

Earlier this month, Microsoft said it was laying off around 9,000 employees, representing less than 4% of its global workforce.