A startup backed by several Silicon Valley heavyweights said on Thursday it had raised $1.3 billion from investors, including Microsoft and Nvidia, amid a boom in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. The investment, a mix of cash and cloud credit, valued the one-year-old company at $4 billion, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters. Inflection released its chatbot Pi last month, which it describes as an AI coach that helps users organize their thoughts around a specific goal or decision, weigh pros and cons, as well as helping them plan how to carry out a task. The new funding and a partnership with Nvidia and CoreWeave, which assists in physically deploying GPUs, will turbocharge Inflection’s computational capacity. The company plans to use the money to create “the world’s largest GPU cluster for AI.” Inflection already has 3,584 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs, but the partnership with Nvidia and CoreWeave will increase that to 22,000 units. The increased horsepower will help Inflection run its foundational language model, which it claims outperforms GPT-3, LLaMA, Chinchilla, and Claude on benchmark tests.
The new round of funding will also boost Inflection’s ability to develop more advanced features for the chatbot, including the capability to take on new tasks such as scheduling and organizing personal finance. The company says it will continue working on its generative AI capabilities, which it uses to transform photos into different styles, such as claymation or watercolors, and convert text into speech.
Inflection has safeguarded user privacy and does not use any details that would make a person identifiable during training, a company spokesperson told Reuters. The company does not collect data or use personal information for ad targeting, and it has strict security practices in place for its infrastructure. It said it would delete all user conversation copies upon request. The spokesperson added that the company has “zero tolerance” for offensive or malicious behavior by its chatbot and is constantly working to improve its security and privacy.
It’s a big deal for small businesses to raise so much capital, and it shows how much interest there is in consumer AI applications. But it’s still early days for the technology, and many challenges can be overcome.
The new funding will help Inflection compete with other consumer-focused AI companies, such as OpenAI and Google’s François, which have raised billions of dollars from investors, including Microsoft.
It will also put Inflection in competition with other AI startups developing chatbots that can help people solve problems, such as how to organize a messy home office or schedule a doctor’s appointment. But the company believes its approach, which emphasizes the importance of goals and priorities, will lead to a better user experience. That is if it can overcome the hurdles to getting people to install and use its product. And that will require more than just a lot of money.
