Microsoft has hired a former Meta executive to bolster its AI supercomputing team

Microsoft

Former Meta executive Jason Taylor joins Microsoft's artificial intelligence supercomputing team.

Here's What We Know

Taylor spent 13 years in leadership roles in Meta's infrastructure divisions. He joins Microsoft as corporate vice president and deputy CTO.

According to Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, Taylor will be involved in building the next generation of systems designed to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence applications. At Meta, he was responsible for AI, data and privacy infrastructure, as well as managing the server hardware budget. In addition, from 2015 to 2017, Taylor led the Open Compute Project Foundation, an organisation to promote open source development for data centres.

Taylor's emergence at Microsoft comes at a time when the company needs more powerful hardware to deploy artificial intelligence systems. According to media reports, Microsoft and its partner OpenAI were considering building a $100bn supercomputer called "Stargate" to support OpenAI's models. However, Microsoft's CTO dismissed these rumours as "amusingly erroneous".

In March, Microsoft also announced the hiring of Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as CEO of a new consumer AI division that will oversee products such as Copilot, Bing and Edge.

Source: The Verge