Microsoft has named Mustafa Suleyman head of its consumer artificial intelligence business, hiring most of the staff from his Inflection AI startup as the software giant seeks to fend off Alphabet's Google in the fiercely contested market for AI products. Suleyman, who co-founded Google's DeepMind, will report to CEO Satya Nadella and oversee a range of projects, such as integrating an AI Copilot into Windows and adding conversational elements to the Bing search engine. His hiring will put Microsoft's consumer AI work under one leader for the first time. Inflection has been a rival of Microsoft's key AI partner OpenAI. The company is shifting to selling AI software to businesses but will continue operating its Pi consumer chatbot business for now.

Mustafa Suleyman says he has chosen to locate his new AI company in the US.

And there's been a long-standing more than 50-year-old grand challenge in science, which is can you go from the amino acid sequence - which is like a genetic sequence of letters that describes a protein - can you just from that one-dimensional letter sequence come up with a 3D structure?

Three years ago, artificial intelligence research firm DeepMind was acquired by Google for a reported £400m. As part of the acquisition, Google agreed to set up an ethics and safety board to ensure that its AI technology is not abused. The existence of the ethics board wasn't confirmed at the time of the acquisition announcement, and the public only became aware of it through a leak to industry news site The Information. But in the years since, senior members of DeepMind have publicly confirmed the board's existence, arguing that it is one of the ways that the company is trying to "lead the way" on ethical issues in AI. But in all that time DeepMind has consistently refused to say who is on the board, what it discusses, or publicly confirm whether or not it has even officially met. The Guardian has asked DeepMind and Google multiple times since the acquisition on 26 January 2014 for transparency around the board, and received just one answer on the record.