Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Artificial intelligence |
Founded | 2022 |
Founders |
|
Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
Key people | Sean White (CEO) |
Products | Pi |
Number of employees | 70 (2024) [1] |
Website | inflection |
Footnotes /references [2] |
Inflection AI, Inc. is an American technology company which has developed machine learning and generative artificial intelligence hardware and apps, founded in 2022. [3] [4] [5] The company is structured as a public benefit corporation and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. [6] [7]
The company was founded by entrepreneurs Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan in 2022. [3] [4] [5] The company has collaborated with Nvidia to develop hardware for generative artificial intelligence. [8]
In June 2023, the company raised US$1.3 billion at $4 billion valuation. [8]
In March 2024, Suleyman and Simonyan announced their departure from the company in order to start Microsoft AI, with Microsoft acqui-hiring nearly the entirety of its 70-person workforce. [9] As part of the deal, Microsoft paid Inflection $650 million to license its technology. The proceeds were used to reimburse Inflection AI's investors. [10] UK's Competition and Markets Authority launched a preliminary probe into the deal to examine the impact on competition and whether the agreement constituted a merger. [11] The regulator concluded that the deal amounted to a "merger situation," but did not pose a threat to competition due to Inflection's small share in the UK consumer market. [12]
The first product released widely by Inflection AI is a chatbot, Pi, named for “personal intelligence,” that is intended to function as an artificial intelligence-based personal assistant. [13] Among the user experience goals that the company has stated for the Pi product are: providing an experience of emotional support for human users, in which the chatbot should be able to maintain an interactive text or voice-based dialogue with a human user that includes elements of kindness, a diplomatic tone about sensitive topics, and humor. [14] Comparisons and contrasts have been made between the Pi chatbot and ChatGPT, a chatbot created by OpenAI. [15]