Inflection AI, Inc. is an American technology company which has developed

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and

generative artificial intelligence Generative artificial intelligence (generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subset of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models machine learning, learn the underlying p ...

hardware and apps, founded in 2022. The company is structured as a

public benefit corporation Public-benefit corporation may refer to several types of corporate entity: United Kingdom * public benefit corporation, the legal form of NHS foundation trusts United States * Benefit corporation or public-benefit corporation, for profit but with ...

and is headquartered in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was ...

History

The company was founded by entrepreneurs

Reid Hoffman Reid Garrett Hoffman (born August 5, 1967) is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman was the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for pro ...

Mustafa Suleyman Mustafa Suleyman (born August 1984) is the co-founder and former head of applied AI at DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company acquired by Google and now owned by Alphabet. His current venture is Inflection AI. Early life Suleyman's fath ...

and Karén Simonyan in 2022. The company has collaborated with

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

to develop hardware for

. In June 2023, the company raised US$1.3 billion at $4 billion valuation. In March 2024, Suleyman and Simonyan announced their departure from the company in order to start Microsoft AI, with Microsoft

acqui-hiring Acqui-hiring or Acq-hiring (a portmanteau of "acquisition" and "hiring", also called talent acquisition) is a neologism which describes the process of Mergers and acquisitions, acquiring a company primarily to recruit its employees, rather than t ...

nearly the entirety of its 70-person workforce. As part of the deal, Microsoft paid Inflection $650 million to license its technology. The proceeds were used to reimburse Inflection AI's investors. UK's

Competition and Markets Authority The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the competition regulator in United Kingdom. It is a non-ministerial government department in the United Kingdom, responsible for strengthening business competition and preventing and reducing anti-com ...

launched a preliminary probe into the deal to examine the impact on competition and whether the agreement constituted a merger. 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.

Products

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 Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

-based

personal assistant A personal assistant, also referred to as personal aide (PA) or personal secretary (PS), is a job title describing a person who assists a specific person with their daily business or personal task,. it is a sub-specialty of secretarial duti ...

. Among the user experience goals that the company has stated for the Pi product are: providing an experience of

emotional support Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. ...

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 Kindness is a type of behavior marked by acts of generosity, consideration, rendering assistant or concern for others, without expecting praise or reward in return. Kindness is a topic of interest in philosophy, religion, and psychology. Kin ...

, a diplomatic tone about sensitive topics, and humor. Comparisons and contrasts have been made between the Pi chatbot and

ChatGPT ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) with both supervised and ...

, a chatbot created by

OpenAI OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company conducts research in the field of AI with the stated goal of promo ...

References

{{reflist 2022 establishments in California Artificial intelligence companies Companies based in Palo Alto, California Public benefit corporations based in California