Microsoft AI has announced that it will shortly be launching a new Microsoft AI hub in London, marking “significant, long-term investment” in the region and a push to hire “the best AI scientists and engineers” in the field.
The hub builds on Microsoft’s recent commitment to upskilling the UK workforce “for the AI era” and building infrastructure to power the AI economy, with £2.5 billion invested to date.
Led by former DeepMind scientist Jordan Hoffmann, the new hub aims to advance language models and their supporting infrastructure, and to create “world-class tooling” for foundation models in collaboration with partners such as OpenAI.
In a Microsoft blog post by Mustafa Suleyman, EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI, plans are shared to begin actively hiring “exceptional individuals” with a desire to work on interesting and challenging AI questions and scenarios.
“This is great news for Microsoft AI and for the U.K. As a British citizen, born and raised in London, I’m proud to have co-founded and built a cutting-edge AI business here,” shares Mustafa. “I’m deeply aware of the extraordinary talent pool and AI ecosystem in the U.K., and I’m excited to make this commitment to the U.K. 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 U.K. reflects this ambition.”
In related news, Microsoft reported an overall revenue of $62.0 billion in the last quarter of 2023, an increase of 18 percent in comparison to the same quarter of the previous year, with Microsoft Cloud revenue contributing more than half of this figure at $33.7 billion – an increase of 24 percent year-over-year.
Elsewhere on AI, Google Cloud has announced updates to three solutions aiming to support healthcare and life sciences organisations in enabling interoperability, building stronger data foundations and deploying generative AI tools in the hopes of improving patient outcomes.
