philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Inflection AI, The Year-Old Startup Behind Chatbot Pi, Raises $1.3 Billion

Less than two months after the launch of their first chatbot Pi, artificial intelligence startup Inflection AI and CEO Mustafa Suleyman have raised $1.3 billion in new funding.

Microsoft, Nvidia and three of tech’s most influential billionaires led the investment in the Palo Alto-based startup launched in early 2022. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt all personally invested, with Nvidia the sole new investor among the group.

The new funding values Inflection at $4 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the transaction. Inflection said the company and Suleyman remained majority shareholders and declined further comment. ...

Against the world’s largest clusters overall, Inflection said it estimated that it would trail only Frontier, the supercomputer maintained by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. ...

The model used for Pi, which Inflection announced earlier in June and said had similar computing capabilities to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is one of the smaller ones it’s had in the works, Suleyman claimed, with much bigger to come. Also in the short-term pipeline: an API for selected partners to train their own conversational AIs. (Inflection doesn’t plan to make that generally available as it focuses on its own consumer products, Suleyman said.) ...

“It’s totally nuts,” he admitted. Facing a potentially historic growth opportunity, Suleyman added, Inflection’s best bet is to “blitz-scale” and raise funding voraciously to grow as fast as possible, risks be damned. ...

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/06/29/inflection-ai-raises-1-billion-for-chatbot-pi/?sh=6fe416601d7e