Microsoft Corp. is forming a new business unit to study the impact of artificial intelligence and create product development recommendations.
Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of the company’s Microsoft AI group, announced the new team today in a series of posts on X. It will be known as the Advanced Planning Unit, or APU for short. The unit is set to operate as part of the Office of Microsoft AI’s CEO.
The tech giant formed Microsoft AI last year to lead the development of its consumer-focused AI products. The group is responsible for, among others, the Copilot family of AI assistants and Bing. Suleyman took the helm of Microsoft AI last March after the company hired most of the employees at Inflection AI Inc., an OpenAI rival he had co-founded in 2022.
The new APU unit’s first task will be to study the societal impact of AI. According to Microsoft job postings, staffers will analyze what changes the technology could drive in areas such as health, work and education. “AI is transforming how we work, live, and connect,” reads one of the postings. “We want to understand how and what it implies for us working on AI today.”
The unit is also set to prepare product development recommendations that will help guide Microsoft’s engineering roadmap. Those recommendations will be shared with product managers, developers, executives and other staffers.
APU is recruiting technologists, economics, psychologists and other professionals. One job posting, for a technology research program manager, reveals that the unit’s work will focus on not only AI but also several other areas. The list includes quantum computing, nuclear energy and semiconductors.
It’s believed that future quantum computers will be capable of performing certain mathematical calculations significantly faster than classical computers. AI models process data using mathematical calculations known as matrix multiplications and additions. As a result, quantum hardware could theoretically be used to speed up AI workloads.
Microsoft maintains an in-house quantum computing research program. The company has explored the possibility of using theoretical particles called Majorana zero modes as qubits.
Nuclear energy, another focus area listed in the APU job posting, is an increasingly important priority for Microsoft. Last year, the company inked a deal with a utility to renovate and reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. The facility will generate electricity for Microsoft data centers, where a growing amount of power is being consumed by AI accelerators.
The APU’s formation comes days after Microsoft detailed another AI-related organizational change. The company launched a new group, CoreAI – Platform and Tools, that will develop technology for products such as GitHub Copilot. It’s led by Jay Parikha, a former Meta Platforms Inc. engineering executive who joined the company last year.
Photo: Microsoft
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