Inflection AI
In plain wordsAn AI company founded in 2022 that made Pi, a friendly personal chatbot. In 2024 its leaders and most of its staff left to join Microsoft.
An American AI company that developed Pi (2023), a conversational assistant designed to be supportive and emotionally attuned rather than task-focused, and its own Inflection language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code., trained on one of the largest GPU clusters of the time. In March 2024 Microsoft hired its co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan and most of its staff to form a new consumer AI division, paying Inflection to license its models. The deal became the template for the reverse acquihirereverse acquihire, n.: A deal in which a big tech company hires a start-up's founders and top staff and pays to license its technology, without buying the company itself. — hiring a startup's leaders and licensing its technology instead of buying the company — later echoed in Google's arrangement with Character.AICharacter.AI, prop. n.: A popular app where people chat with AI characters — invented personas, fictional figures or imitations of real people — that other users have created. and Amazon's with Adept, and it drew scrutiny from competition authorities in the United Kingdom and the United States. The remaining company turned to enterprise AI.
Origin
Founded in 2022 in Palo Alto, California, by Mustafa SuleymanMustafa Suleyman, prop. n.: A British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and Inflection AI, leads Microsoft's effort to build its own advanced AI models, and has written about the difficulty of containing powerful AI., a co-founder of DeepMind, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and former DeepMind researcher Karén Simonyan.
Related
- Mustafa SuleymanMustafa Suleyman, prop. n.: A British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and Inflection AI, leads Microsoft's effort to build its own advanced AI models, and has written about the difficulty of containing powerful AI.
- Microsoft ResearchMicrosoft Research, prop. n.: Microsoft's research division, with laboratories on several continents, whose scientists have produced influential work on speech, vision and language AI.
- Character.AICharacter.AI, prop. n.: A popular app where people chat with AI characters — invented personas, fictional figures or imitations of real people — that other users have created.
- chatbotchatbot, n.: Software you chat with in ordinary language, by typing or talking, as you would with a person. The newest ones, such as ChatGPT, can answer questions, draft writing and keep long conversations going.
- AI companionAI companion, n.: A chatbot designed to be a friend, partner or confidant rather than a tool: it remembers you, has a personality and keeps up an ongoing relationship.
Mentioned in
Mustafa SuleymanMustafa Suleyman, prop. n.: A British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and Inflection AI, leads Microsoft's effort to build its own advanced AI models, and has written about the difficulty of containing powerful AI.