Microsoft hires a heavyweight from Meta to boost its AI team

Microsoft has hired Jason Taylor, a former executive from Meta, to join its artificial intelligence supercomputing team. According to a LinkedIn post shared last Monday by Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s CTO, Taylor will hold the position of Corporate Vice President and Deputy CTO.

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“He spent most of his career taking on impossible computer challenges,” wrote Scott. “I am delighted that he has chosen to join Microsoft and work alongside Scott Guthrie, Rani Borkar, Noelle Walsh, Girish Bablani and our OpenAI partners to build the next set of systems that will push the boundaries of AI for all of us.”

Taylor served at Meta from 2009 to 2022, most recently holding the position of Vice President of Infrastructure at the company. According to his LinkedIn profile, his responsibilities included AI infrastructure, data and privacy, and managing the company’s server budgets. From 2015 to 2017, Taylor also served as President of the Open Compute Project Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting open-source designs in data centers.

Both Microsoft and OpenAI require more powerful hardware to keep up with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence models. An article from The Information published last month hinted that Microsoft and OpenAI had plans to build a $100 billion supercomputer, called “Stargate”, to boost OpenAI’s models.

However, Scott has denied these rumors in his recent post on LinkedIn, stating that most of these recent speculations are “amusingly incorrect”.

With Taylor, Microsoft makes it clear that it wants to acquire the best in the industry to strengthen the development of its AI. In March, Microsoft announced the hiring of Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google DeepMind, as CEO of a new consumer AI division, where he will oversee the development of Bing, Copilot, and Edge.

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