Microsoft hires former Meta exec to bolster AI supercomputing team

Former Meta executive Jason Taylor is joining Microsoft’s AI supercomputing team. In a LinkedIn station connected Monday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott says Taylor will return connected nan domiciled of firm vice president and lawman CTO to thief “build nan adjacent group of systems that will push nan frontier of AI forward.”

Taylor worked astatine Meta from 2009 to 2022, wherever he astir precocious served arsenic nan company’s vice president of infrastructure. He handled AI, data, and privateness infrastructure, arsenic good arsenic managing nan company’s server budgets, according to his LinkedIn profile. Taylor was besides nan chair of nan Open Compute Project Foundation from 2015 to 2017, an statement that promotes open-source designs successful information centers.

Microsoft and OpenAI request much robust hardware to support up pinch quickly advancing AI systems. Last month, a study from The Information suggested Microsoft and OpenAI wanted to build a $100 cardinal supercomputer, dubbed “Stargate,” to powerfulness OpenAI’s models. (However, Microsoft’s Scott seems to push backmost connected these rumors successful his station connected LinkedIn today, saying that astir of nan caller speculation is “amusingly wrong.”)

In March, Microsoft announced that it hired Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman arsenic nan CEO of a caller user AI section that oversees Copilot, Bing, and Edge.