# Karén Simonyan

> Karén Simonyan is an AI researcher, Inflection AI co-founder and chief scientist of Microsoft AI. He co-authored the VGG computer-vision work at Oxford, led large-scale deep-learning research at DeepMind, and helped start the conversational AI company behind Pi.

- **Role:** Chief Scientist, Microsoft AI
- **Organizations:** Microsoft AI, Inflection AI, DeepMind, Vision Factory, University of Oxford
- **Education:** DPhil in Engineering Science, University of Oxford
- **Known for:** Co-authored the VGG research demonstrating the value of 16-19 weight layers built with small 3×3 filters., Co-authored research on two-stream convolutional networks for video action recognition and spatial transformer networks., Led the Large Scale Deep Learning team at DeepMind, according to Inflection AI’s founding announcement.

## Career timeline

- **2013** — Completed an Oxford DPhil on large-scale learning of image representations.
- **2014** — Co-authored the VGG image-recognition paper with Andrew Zisserman; co-founded Vision Factory, later acquired by DeepMind.
- **2015** — Published the VGG work at ICLR and co-authored work on spatial transformer networks.
- **2022** — Co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman and Reid Hoffman as chief scientist.
- **2024** — Joined Microsoft AI as chief scientist when the new organization was formed.
- **2026** — Named among the authors of Microsoft AI’s MAI-Thinking-1 research paper.

## Achievements

- Co-authored the VGG research demonstrating the value of 16-19 weight layers built with small 3×3 filters.
- Co-authored research on two-stream convolutional networks for video action recognition and spatial transformer networks.
- Led the Large Scale Deep Learning team at DeepMind, according to Inflection AI’s founding announcement.
- Co-founded Inflection AI and served as its chief scientist.
- Appointed chief scientist of Microsoft AI in March 2024.

## Latest updates

- **2026-06** — Microsoft AI released MAI-Thinking-1 research listing Simonyan among its authors.
- **2026-06** — Microsoft AI announced seven internally developed models across image, voice, transcription, coding and reasoning; his personal contribution to each model is not specified.
- **2024-03** — Microsoft announced Simonyan as chief scientist of its new Microsoft AI organization.

## Links

- Website: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~karen/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kar%C3%A9n-simonyan-3aba65231
- GitHub: https://github.com/ksimonyan

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/kar-n-simonyan
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29