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Inflection AI, a one-year-old artificial intelligence start-up set up by one of DeepMind’s founders, has raised $1.3bn from Microsoft and Nvidia, among others, as the surge of investor interest around generative AI grows.
Led by chief executive Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s team of 35, hired from DeepMind, Google, OpenAI and Microsoft, launched a chatbot called Pi, adding to the flood of similar products rolled out publicly this year by the likes of OpenAI, Google and Snap.
With Nvidia joining its investment round, the San Francisco-based start-up, co-founded by LinkedIn creator Reid Hoffman, said it has access to 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, the most in-demand resource in the AI industry today, costing $40,000 apiece.
Microsoft, another lead investor, has placed a large and public bet on ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, a leading player in the development of generative AI, in a “multibillion-dollar investment” over several years. People familiar with the talks previously said OpenAI was seeking $10bn from Microsoft at a $29bn valuation.
Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, said that “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”.
The fundraising comes as excitement over “generative AI” start-ups has intensified since the launch of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT late last year, creating a rare bright spot in a tech landscape dominated by tumbling valuations and job cuts. Last month, Toronto-based start-up Cohere raised $270mn from Nvidia among others, at a $2.1bn valuation. Meanwhile, Mistral, a four-week old French AI start-up, this month raised €105mn in Europe’s largest-ever seed round.
Pi, Inflection’s chatbot, can have personal conversations with users, either directly via an app, or through text, WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook.
At its launch in May, Suleyman described the chatbot as having the persona of a sympathetic sounding-board, rather than trying to provide information. The product, which has been beta-tested by users for several months, is meant purely for casual conversation, rather than writing or coding, which makes it safer and easier to control, Suleyman said.
Suleyman founded Inflection following his departure in early 2022 from Google, where he had helped develop the LaMDA conversational model.
He was one of three founders of London-based Google DeepMind, which was set up in the UK in 2010 and bought by Google for £400mn four years later.
Suleyman left DeepMind in 2019 following an independent investigation into bullying and harassment accusations against him. He has publicly apologised for his behaviour, saying in a recorded interview that he “really screwed up” and was “very demanding and pretty relentless”.
Inflection previously raised money from venture capital firms including Greylock Partners, where Suleyman remains an investor.