On April 7th, Microsoft announced the opening of a new artificial intelligence center in central London.

New Artificial Intelligence Center

Microsoft stated that the new artificial intelligence center will work closely with the company's AI team and partners, including OpenAI, to drive groundbreaking work, advance state-of-the-art language models and their supporting infrastructure, and create world-class tools for basic models.

The new artificial intelligence center will be led by artificial intelligence scientist and engineer Jordan Hoffmann. Hoffman has worked at artificial intelligence startups Inflection AI and DeepMind at Google's artificial intelligence research laboratory.

It is worth noting that the news of the construction of a new artificial intelligence center in London was announced in an article by Mustafa Suleyman, the newly appointed Executive Vice President and CEO of Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. Suleiman was a co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI.

Suleiman joined DeepMind as a research scientist and became a co-founder in 2020. In 2022, he founded Inflection AI, an artificial intelligence company, and recruited people from DeepMind and Meta. In March 2024, Suleiman joined Microsoft with dozens of Inflection AI employees.

Microsoft stated that the London Artificial Intelligence Center plans to make significant long-term investments locally. Next, the company will gradually release recruitment information to search for top talents in the field of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft already has a strong influence in the field of artificial intelligence in the UK, including the Microsoft Cambridge Research Institute Laboratory, which conducts research in the fields of artificial intelligence, cloud, and productivity.

In terms of investment in artificial intelligence research and development, the UK is considered one of the top countries in the world, second only to the United States and China. Recently, Microsoft announced an investment of £ 2.5 billion to expand its artificial intelligence data center infrastructure in the UK and promised to train over one million people to participate in the artificial intelligence economy.

Microsoft also promises to introduce over 20000 state-of-the-art GPUs to the UK by 2026, expand its Accelerated Foundation Models Research program, and have priority access to the scientific and research community in the UK.

Contending for talent

In recent months, as the competition for artificial intelligence intensifies, there has been a competition for AI talent in countries such as the UK and Europe.

OpenAI opened its first international office in London last year and quickly opened its second office in Dublin. The company's Vice President of Human Resources, Diane Yoon, stated that the company plans to continue expanding into other countries.

Artificial intelligence startup Cohere opened its UK office last year, designing internal chatbots and other tools for clients. Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, recently revealed the company's expansion plan to the public. Gomez stated that the company is planning to double the number of employees in London to 50.

As artificial intelligence companies flood into the UK and Europe, there are also companies facing talent loss. Among them, DeepMind, headquartered in London, has the most severe talent loss.

Previously, the departure of DeepMind's co-founder Suleiman and research scientist Arthur Mensch dealt a significant blow to DeepMind. After leaving DeepMind, Suleiman created Inflection AI, while Mensch created Mistral AI and served as CEO. Both startups quickly received valuations worth billions of dollars.

At the beginning of its establishment, Cohere also dug corners in DeepMind. In 2022, Cohere hired Phil Blunsom, the chief researcher who had worked at DeepMind for seven years, as its chief scientist. In addition, DeepMind computer scientist Sebastian Ruder also switched jobs from DeepMind to Cohere in January of this year.

Biooptimus, a Parisian startup founded by former DeepMind employees, raised $35 million in February this year. Thomas Clozel, an early investor of the company, stated that startups hope to recruit talent from large technology companies such as Google and hope that they can have greater influence on the company's development direction.

Klozel stated that Google is one of the best companies in the field and has cultivated some of the best talents. But in a smaller startup, you have a unique opportunity to be loyal to the work you are passionate about and closely related to the success of the company. That's why so many people are leaving DeepMind.

Due to the continuous loss of talent, DeepMind cannot sit still. Insiders revealed that in order to prevent employees from joining other companies or starting their own company, DeepMind provided several million dollar worth of restricted stock to a few senior researchers earlier this year. However, the effectiveness of this move remains to be seen.

As major companies engage in a fierce competition for talent, the salaries of AI talents have also skyrocketed. According to data from headhunting company Avery Fairbank, there was an "exponential increase" in executive compensation at UK artificial intelligence companies last year.

Charlie Fairbank, the general manager of the company, stated that executives who originally had a total salary of around £ 350,000 have seen salary increases of £ 50,000 to £ 100,000. He believes that "as foreign artificial intelligence giants such as Antiopic and Cohere enter the London market, the competition for artificial intelligence talent will further intensify."