Ex-Microsoft exec joins MIT spinoff Liquid AI's advisory board

Mikhail Parakhin, formerly known as the Bing & advertising chief at Microsoft who left the Redmond tech giant after Mustafa Suleyman’s hiring, is now joining the advisory board of Liquid AI.

Liquid AI, a new startup from MIT, is working to bring a new type of AI technology called liquid neural networks to the market. These networks are smaller, more flexible, and use less computing power than traditional AI.

“Of all the companies trying the non-transformer architectures, I believe Liquid AI is the front runner. Will try to help them succeed,” he says in a tweet.

Co-founded by MIT researchers, including Daniela Rus, the company has raised $37.5 million to create AI systems that can handle tough tasks like guiding drones. These networks work well in changing environments and could be used in things like self-driving cars or medical data analysis.

Liquid AI plans to offer this technology to businesses through customizable AI solutions.

“Their technology will greatly reduce the cost of AI for companies versus the current Transformer-based models and remains adaptable beyond training. It also allows for explainability as opposed to the black box of existing models,” says investor & PagsGroup boss Stephen Pagliuca about Liquid AI’s tech.

Parakhin, an active X user, is a well-known figure in the Windows community for regularly updating on the smallest development of Bing and Copilot on social media.

That, was until a leadership change at Microsoft happened: the Redmond company sealed a $620 million deal to license Inflection AI’s tech, but at the same time, also hired some of the brightest people at the company including founder Suleyman, who then headed the new Microsoft AI organization.