DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman leaves Google

Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of artificial intelligence research company DeepMind, has left Google to join venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Suleyman has brought to an end an eight-year run at Google, where he was most recently the company’s vice president of AI product management and policy.

He joined Google when it bought DeepMind in 2014 and became the latter’s head of applied AI. Suleyman was reportedly placed on administrative leave in 2019 following allegations that he bullied employees. Suleyman, who moved to Google at the end of that year, said on a podcast with Greylock partner Reid Hoffman this week that he "really screwed up" and that “I remain very sorry about the impact that that caused people and the hurt that people felt there.”

As The New York Times notes, Suleyman was among those who resisted Google's AI endeavors with the US Department of Defense. Google ended up backing out of that project, though in November it said it was making a bid for the Pentagon's Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability cloud contract.

DeepMind may be best known for its AI systems that can compete with the best human players of certain games. Google has also employed DeepMind's knowhow to improve arrival time estimates in Google Maps, track wildlife and detect breast cancer.