Mustafa Suleyman (born August 1984) is the co-founder and former head of applied AI at DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company acquired by Google and now owned by Alphabet. His current venture is Inflection AI. Early life Suleyman's father is a Syrian-born taxi driver and his mother is an English nurse. He grew up off Caledonian Road in the London Borough of Islington, where he lived with his parents and his two younger brothers. Suleyman went to Thornhill Primary School (a state school in Islington) followed by Queen Elizabeth's School, a boys' grammar school in Barnet. Around that time, he met his DeepMind co-founder, Demis Hassabis, through his best friend, Demis's younger brother. Suleyman said that he and Hassabis would discuss how they could impact the world. Career At 19, Suleyman dropped out of Mansfield College, Oxford to help start the Muslim Youth Helpline with his university friend Mohammed Mamdani, a telephone counselling service. The organization became one of the largest mental health support services of its kind in the UK. Suleyman subsequently worked as a policy officer on human rights for Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, before going on to start Reos Partners, a ‘systemic change’ consultancy that uses methods from conflict resolution to navigate social problems. As a negotiator and facilitator, Mustafa worked for a wide range of clients such as the United Nations, the Dutch government, and the World Wide Fund for Nature. Suleyman co-founded DeepMind Technologies, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) company and became its chief product officer. DeepMind was bought by Google in 2014 and he became head of applied AI at DeepMind. In August 2019, Bloomberg reported that Suleyman had been placed on administrative leave following controversy about him. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal revealed that he had been placed on leave in 2019 following an investigation into employees' allegations of bullying as their manager. The company hired an external lawyer to investigate the allegations before placing him on leave at the time, and shortly thereafter Suleyman left to take a VP role at parent company Google. An email circulated by DeepMind's leadership to staff after the story broke, as well as additional details published by Business Insider, said Suleyman's "management style fell short" of expected standards. DeepMind Suleyman is one of the three co-founders of the artificial intelligence / machine learning company DeepMind Technologies, and started out as its chief product officer.