Inflection

Inflection is an artificial intelligence (AI) studio developing personal AI with its first product, Pi (personal intelligence) described as a "supportive and empathetic conversational AI." Inflection is an AI-first consumer products company. Unlike other AI research companies, Inflection is not working toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Instead, it is focusing on advanced applied AI, an approach the company believes is the safest way to harness new AI technologies. As well as Pi, Inflection has also released Inflection-1, the company's in-house LLM to power Pi.

Inflection was founded on March 8, 2022, by Mustafa Suleyman, Reid Hoffman, and Karén Simonyan. Suleyman, a venture partner at Greylock (where Inflection was incubated), is the company's CEO with Simonyan acting as chief scientist. Simonyan designed VGGNet before selling his first company to DeepMind, where he led the deep learning scaling team, playing an important role in breakthroughs such as AlphaZero, AlphaFold, WaveNet, and BigGAN. Hoffman, a general partner at Greylock, is a well-known entrepreneur and investor who cofounded LinkedIn.

The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with an office in London. The name "Inflection" embraces what the company sees as a moment of transformation and exponential change. According to a May 2022 SEC filing, Inflection had secured $225 million in equity financing, although the source of this capital was unclear. The company later confirmed it had raised $225 million in a first round of funding in early 2022 from Greylock, Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Mike Schroepfer, Demis Hassabis, Will.i.am, Horizons Ventures, and Dragoneer. On June 29, 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion in new funding from Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and new investor Nvidia. As part of the announcement, the company stated the funding will support its work building and designing its first product Pi.

Inflection is building the "largest AI cluster in the world" with its partners CoreWeave and Nvidia. The cluster, comprising 22,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs, will support the training and development of new-generation large-scale AI models. The cluster develops 22 exaFLOPs in the 16-bit precision mode and more if lower prevision is utilized. In June 2023, Inflection stated rollout of the cluster is underway and they have confirmed its performance in a recent MLPerf benchmark.

On July 21, 2023, Inflection announced that it is working alongside the White House and other major AI labs (e.g., Amazon, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, etc.) to take a proactive precautionary approach to the development of large AI models.

Pi is a personal AI chatbot designed to be kind and helpful. Trained on billions of lines of text available on the open web, Pi was developed to have conversations with users and answer a huge range of questions from general knowledge to personal relationships. Released on May 2, 2023, Pi is free to use, with Inflection still making plans for how to charge for the product in the future. Inflection believes Pi should be aligned with the user's interests, and the user should be the person who pays for it. Therefore, a subscription or other form of direct payment will be the company's default business model. Users can interact with Pi from a browser interface as well as a number of other platforms including iOS, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

Announced on June 22, 2023, Inflection-1 is the company's in-house LLM that powers Pi and will be available through a conversational API. Inflection-1 was trained using thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs on a very large dataset. Inflection developed a number of proprietary technical advances by taking advantage of its end-to-end pipeline. Inflection showed its LLM outperforms models in its compute class on a wide range of commonly used benchmarks, such as GPT-3.5, LLaMA, Chinchilla, and PaLM-540B.

On November 22, 2023, Inflection announced it had finished training Inflection-2, its second-generation LLM. Inflection states Inflection-2 is "substantially more capable" than Inflection-1, demonstrating improved factual knowledge, stylistic control, and reasoning. Inflection-2 was trained on 5,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs in fp8 mixed precision for ~10²⁵ FLOPs and is therefore in the same training compute class as Google’s PaLM 2. Results published by Inflection state that Inflection-2 outperforms PaLM 2 on many standard AI performance benchmarks, including MMLU, TriviaQA, HellaSwag & GSM8k. The company announced that Inflection-2 will begin powering Pi shortly after its launch.

Pi (Personal intelligence) is a personal AI from Inflection designed to be supportive and smart while providing conversations, friendly advice, and concise information in a natural, flowing style. Released on May 2, 2023, Pi is built on Inflection's proprietary LLM, called Inflection-1, and does not rely on third-party language model APIs.

Pi was designed to allow users to express themselves, share their curiosities, and explore new ideas using a trusted personal AI. While other AI systems prioritize productivity, search, or question answering, Pi aims to be a coach, confidante, creative partner, or sounding board. Inflection CEO and cofounder Mustafa Suleyman described Pi as:

Pi is a new kind of AI, one that isn’t just smart but also has good EQ. We think of Pi as a digital companion on hand whenever you want to learn something new, when you need a sounding board to talk through a tricky moment in your day, or just pass the time with a curious and kind counterpart... We have a lot to learn and a long way to go, but we are excited to bring this first version of Pi to people around the world.

Pi characteristics include the following:

• Kind and supportive—the AI aims to help users process thoughts and feelings or work through decisions step by step
• Curious and humble—it learns and adapts and gives feedback in plain, natural language while improving over time
• Creative and fun—playful and silly, able to make creative connections
• In development—the system is still under development and can provide incorrect information.

Pi is free to use at launch and is available across platforms, including online (at https://heypi.com), Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS, or through a dedicated iOS app for iPhone or iPad. Inflection plans to launch an Android app in the future. While Pi is free to use at launch, Inflection has not made any announcement about how it will charge for the product in the future. However, it has stated that subscriptions or another form of direct payment will be its primary business model. It also recognizes some users may prefer a free service supported by advertising.