Palo Alto-based startup Inflection AI has announced a massive $1.3 billion funding round, led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and new investor NVIDIA. This latest investment brings the total raised by the company to $1.525 billion.
Inflection AI, founded in early 2022 by Mustafa Suleyman, Karén Simonyan, and Reid Hoffman, is an ‘AI Studio' specializing in creating so-called personal AIs. The company's mission is to make personal AIs available to everyone worldwide. The Inflection AI team includes some of the industry's top AI experts who previously worked at DeepMind, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta.
Building the World's Largest AI Cluster
Inflection AI, in collaboration with CoreWeave and NVIDIA, is constructing the largest AI cluster in the world, comprising 22,000 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. This unprecedented deployment will support the training and deployment of a new generation of large-scale AI models. The cluster is estimated to develop a staggering 22 exaFLOPS in the 16-bit precision mode, and even more if lower precision is utilized.
Pi: A New Class of AI
The funding will be used to continue the development of Inflection's first product, Pi, a new class of AI chatbot which launched in May. Pi, short for “personal intelligence,” is designed to be a kind and supportive companion offering text and voice conversations, friendly advice, and concise information in a natural, flowing style.
Pi can generate original and coherent responses on the fly, based on the context and the user's input. Pi can also express emotions and empathy, using natural language and emojis. Inflection AI claims that Pi is the first chatbot that can successfully mimic an empathetic and caring human being, without resorting to deception or manipulation. Pi is transparent about being an AI, and does not pretend to be someone else. Pi is also respectful of the user's privacy and data, and does not share or sell any personal information.
Pi is based on a deep neural network architecture that combines natural language understanding, natural language generation, and reinforcement learning. It is trained on a large corpus of diverse and high-quality conversational data, collected from various sources such as books, movies, podcasts, social media, and human-human dialogues. Pi can create a unique user profile based on their interactions and feedback. It can adjust its tone, style, mood, and level of formality according to the user's preferences and the situation.
“Personal AI is going to be the most transformational tool of our lifetimes. This is truly an inflection point. We're excited to collaborate with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and CoreWeave as well as Eric, Bill and many others to bring this vision to life,” said Mustafa Suleyman, CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI.
Support from Industry Giants
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, expressed his support for Inflection AI's groundbreaking work, stating that the world-class team at Inflection AI is helping to lead this groundbreaking work, deploying NVIDIA AI technology to develop, train and deploy massive generative AI models that enable amazing personal digital assistants.
Kevin Scott, CTO and EVP AI at Microsoft, also voiced his support, stating, “We're proud to support Inflection AI as they pursue their vision for more trusted and personal AI experiences. It is an exciting time, and ambitious AI companies like Inflection AI are pioneering the industry with transformative products that are accessible, easy to use, and show the many possibilities of AI.”
