‘Personal’ Generative AI Startup Inflection AI Raises $1.3B From Microsoft, Nvidia, Bill Gates, and Eric Schmidt
Generative AI startup Inflection AI has raised $1.3 billion in a new funding round led by Nvidia, Microsoft, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google co-founder Eric Schmidt, and Inflection AI’s own co-founder (and former head of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman. The staggering size of the funding, and the power of the names signing the check, will fuel Inflection’s ambitions to build the largest AI cluster in the world. The cluster will then power Inflection’s work on leveraging large language models capable of emulating emotional intelligence in conversation.
Inflection Ascendant
Inflection launched out of stealth this year when it introduced a generative AI chatbot named Pi, short for Personal Intelligence. Pi is designed to project an empathetic and caring persona using the startup’s proprietary Inflection-1 LLM. As the market for the models behind generative AI applications took off, however, Inflection decided to turn the Inflection-1 LLM into an API and make it available as an alternative to OpenAI, Google, and other developers. Inflection has plans to use some of the funding to continue enhancing and improving Pi and the underlying personalized generative AI concept.
“Personal AI is going to be the most transformational tool of our lifetimes. This is truly an inflection point,” Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said. “We’re excited to collaborate with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and CoreWeave as well as Eric, Bill and many others to bring this vision to life.”
The investment by LLM heavyweights like Nvidia and Microsoft, not to mention Microsoft and Google-affiliated household names like Gates and Schmidt, is quite notable considering Inflection’s goal of competing with their respective LLM projects. The reasoning may come down to an agreement to pool resources for their shared vision of generative AI, which will require processing power not yet available. That’s why Inflection is teaming with Nvidia and CoreWeave to put together the necessary AI cluster. At 22,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs, it will provide 22 exaFLOPS to run the most precise version of the Inflection-1 model. The completed project will not only outmatch any existing AI cluster, there’s only one computing cluster of any kind that will be bigger.
“A powerful benefit of the AI revolution is the ability to use natural, conversational language to interact with supercomputers to simplify aspects of our everyday lives,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. “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.”
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