The Inflection AI Story: How a Secretive Unicorn Reached a $4 Billion Valuation

In June, the young family of generative AI (gen AI) unicorns suddenly got a new member. Inflection AI ripped the chart suggested by CBInsights just a month before and got onto the third position, dethroning Cohere AI. So we have to oblige, and after covering two Gen AI leaders OpenAI and Anthropic, we dive into the precocious startup, Inflection AI.

Having introduced its core product, an AI assistant named Pi, in May and published a memo about Inflection-1, a Large Language Model (LLM) behind Pi in June, Inflection AI took the industry by storm the same month with an astonishing $1.3 billion in funding and a $4 billion valuation – all within its first two years of existence!

The company's sudden surge owes much to the attraction of high-profile investors, including technology luminaries such as Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and Reid Hoffman (also a co-founder), along with tech giants Microsoft and Nvidia. These financial ties extend beyond mere investments. Microsoft is providing its cloud computing infrastructure to strengthen Inflection's capabilities, while Nvidia, in partnership with CoreWeave, is integrating 20,000 of its H100 GPUs for LLM training.

Let's dive deeper and discover more about the founders, their vision, the development behind the model powering Pi, and other crucial details.

Finding them was not that easy!

Content Overview

1. The starting point of Inflection

2. Financial and legal situation

3. Mission of Inflection and its founders

4. First product

5. Tech behind Pi (LLM development facts)

6. How Inflection is going to make money?

7. Founders’ attitude toward AI risks

8. A few not widely known facts about Inflection's founders

   
   

1. The starting point of Inflection

According to the official information, Inflection AI has three founders:

• Karén Simonyan (Chief Scientist and Co-founder)
• Reid Hoffman (Co-founder)
• Mustafa Suleyman (CEO and Co-founder)

Operating with a low profile, Inflection hasn't been very transparent with independent media. Some information available that extends beyond mere press releases or PR work stems from the podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman for Greylock Partners (a VC fund where Hoffman has been a partner since 2009). In January 2022, announcing Mustafa Suleyman as a new partner in Greylock Partners, Reid Hoffman said: “I’ve known Mustafa personally for more than a decade. We first met at a pub in London. What struck me most was our inspiring and provocative discussion on the power and potential of AI to help solve some of humanity’s most urgent challenges. It marked the beginning of a deep and lasting friendship between Mustafa and I.”

More than a decade ago from 2022 was about a time when Mustafa Suleyman (along with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg) co-founded DeepMind, one of the first AI research labs. In 2014, it was acquired by Google (now the main AI R&D is led by the new structure called Google DeepMind). In January 2022, Suleyman left Google, joined Greylock Partners, and in March 2022, Inflection was born (incubated by Greylock). Located in Palo Alto, California.

Introducing Inflection AI on the Greylock website, Suleyman called it an "AI-first consumer products company." However, at that moment he didn't clarify exactly what that meant.

2. Financial situation and legal situation

In May 2022, TechCrunch reported that Inflection had secured $225 million in equity financing, though the source of the capital wasn't immediately clear as Inflection didn't respond to the request for more information. Subsequently, when Inflection announced the $1.3 billion funding round in 2023, they clarified in the official press release that the first round was raised from Greylock, Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Mike Schroepfer, Demis Hassabis, Will.i.am, Horizons Ventures, and Dragoneer.

At some point, the information on Inflection's website changed to describe the company as an "AI studio creating a personal AI for everyone."

They chose the same legal structure as did Anthropic: public benefit corporation, a new type of corporation to balance the interests of shareholders, materially affected individuals, and the public good.

3. Mission of Inflection and its founders

Introducing Inflection, as always, on the Greylock podcast, Reid Hoffman said, "Our mission was to build a tool that is designed to understand the user, rather than the other way around. We wanted it to be more than an answerer of questions but a participant in the dialogue that helps you along your life's path – whether that be connecting with other human beings, making decisions, figuring out how to navigate a problem at work, or more.”

Throughout other interviews about Inflection and its first product Pi, they used words such as 'reliable,' 'ever-present,' 'non-judgmental,' 'kind,' and 'supportive’. To get to the point where a chatbot can be all this sounded like a mission.

4. First product

In May 2022, Inflection AI shipped its first core product – Pi, a chatbot with the primary goal to serve as a 'Personal AI'. Named for "personal intelligence", Pi functions in several roles like teacher, coach, and confidante, designed to align with individual interests and needs. It’s said that Pi uses emotional intelligence to aim for human-like conversations. While its use case is narrower than other services like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, it strives to mimic human conversation patterns. Pi's training incorporates data up to November 2022, and it is committed to user privacy, refraining from using identifiable information in training. WhatsApp, Instagram PMs, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, or via the website – the ways to talk to Pi. The main difference from the most commonly used LLM products is the Pi remembers communications with you. The chatbot is also made to resist starting to flirt with a user.

5. Tech behind Pi

Not much is known about the technology behind Pi. However, a month after its launch, the company released a memo revealing its foundation on the proprietary LLM, Inflection-1. According to the website, Pi doesn't utilize any third-party language model APIs.

In the memo, the company stated: "The Inflection-1 architecture, dataset, and training procedure are proprietary, and we omit their details in this memo."

What we do know is that Inflection-1 demonstrated impressive performance on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark, surpassing other well-known LLMs such as Meta's LLaMA, OpenAI's GPT 3.5, and Google's PaLM 540B, particularly in answering trivia questions. Additional information from Inflection's partner, CoreWeave's official website, confirms that Inflection AI utilized 3,500 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and a cluster comprising over 40,000 cables and 500 miles of InfiniBand fiber cables for MLPerf Training benchmark competition submission, achieving an impressive 11-minute training benchmark.

There are rumors, that Inflection AI is working on a cutting-edge supercomputer equipped with 22,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs that is expected to be one of the largest In the industry, right behind AMD's Frontier. However, there's some debate regarding the true computational power of this setup. While Inflection AI claims that these GPUs could provide 22 exaflops in 16-bit precision mode, calculations by The Next Platform suggest that the actual performance might not meet these expectations.

Though the model is proprietary, the references that are mentioned in the official memo do not list any in-house research papers.

6. How Inflection is going to make money?

There are many unknowns at the moment. Currently, Inflection AI is a free platform available to everyone worldwide. The developers are exploring different monetization strategies, including the possibility of adding subscription options. Another option is to keep it free but use ads to earn revenue.

On our request to learn more about the business model, neither Reid Hoffman nor Mustafa Suleyman replied. In another podcast with Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman stated, “It’s really important to us that we figure out a monetization mechanic that doesn’t incentivize us to keep you engaged or maybe distracted on the platform for as long as possible. And likewise, we sort of don’t want to drive the kind of addictive dopamine hits of outrage or anger or despair or viral misinformation. These kinds of things have really incentivized people to spend longer on the platform, and sometimes that’s because they’re getting paid for it. We are very, very conscious that this is a moment that needs to change with AI, and that new business models need to emerge to address this."

7. Founders’ attitude toward AI risks

Reid Hoffman intentionally chose to be positive about AI. The New York Times reports, “So in recent months, Mr. Hoffman has engaged in an aggressive thought-leadership regimen to extol the virtues of A.I. He has done so in blog posts, television interviews, and fireside chats. He has spoken to government officials around the world. He hosts three podcasts and a YouTube channel. And in March, he published a book, “Impromptu,” co-written with the A.I. tool GPT-4.

“I’m beating the positive drum very loudly, and I’m doing so deliberately,” he said.

The 55-year-old sits on the boards of 11 tech companies including Microsoft, which has gone all in on AI, and eight nonprofits. His venture capital firm, Greylock Partners, has backed at least 37 AI companies.”

In an interview to Washington Post, Reid Hoffman said that the conversations about superintelligence divert us from the real risk, which is AI in the hands of bad actors. He thinks that since technology 'always puts tools in the hands of good and bad actors,' throughout our history, we have learned how to figure this out. In the same interview, he said, 'Part of the reason why I beat the drum so firmly in the positive camp is not that I'm risk unaware, and I think we need to navigate them, but oh, my gosh, every month we delay an AI tutor and doctor, for everyone who has a smartphone or has a friend who has a smartphone, just think about the human suffering that is caused by that delay, and that is super important.

8. A few not widely known facts about Inflection Founders

Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman (on Twitter) is among a small group of interconnected tech executives leading the A.I. charge, many of whom also led the last internet boom.

1. He is part of the "PayPal Mafia," a group of former PayPal employees who went on to become successful entrepreneurs and investors in the tech industry.

   
   

2. Reid Hoffman's entrepreneurial journey has been marked by resilience and determination. After his failure with SocialNet, he became obsessed with scaling and invested heavily in the social networking phenomenon, which eventually led to the co-founding of LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network with a diversified revenue model that includes subscriptions, advertising, and software licensing. He also led the company to its successful acquisition by Microsoft.

   
   

3. One of the first investors in OpenAI, he was sitting on its board until March 2023, stepping down to avoid any conflicts of interest with Inflection AI. He still sits on the Board of directors at Microsoft.

   
   

4. Reid Hoffman is a proponent of effective altruism (founders of OpenAI and Anthropic have strong ties with EA also), which advocates for using wealth and resources to create the best for the most people. In 2017, he said to the Atlantic: “If you have wealth, and at least a reasonable moral compass, to ask, “How do you create the most good for the most people?” I’m not saying this is the perfect system. But what’s the better system?”

   
   

5. Reid Hoffman is a prominent philanthropist and has invested over $1.5 billion in impact investments through charitable entities.

   
   

6. Hoffman is an avid fan of Dungeons & Dragons, and he attributes its influence to his thinking about life as a heroic quest with various players coming together to accomplish something.

   
   

7. He believes in the power of friendship and considers it the true center of his life. Reid views friendship as a skill that can be learned and improved through asking questions and interacting with others.

Mustafa Suleyman (on Twitter)

1. He dropped out of Oxford University at 19 to start the Muslim Youth Helpline, a telephone counseling service for Muslims in the UK.

   
   

2. He worked as a policy officer on human rights for Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, before founding Reos Partners, a ‘systemic change’ consultancy that uses methods from conflict resolution to navigate social problems.

   
   

3. In February 2016, Suleyman launched DeepMind Health at the Royal Society of Medicine, a project that builds clinician-led technology for the NHS and other partners to improve frontline healthcare services

   
   

4. He received the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2019 for his influence in the UK technology sector and also accepted the Silicon Valley Visionary Award the same year

   
   

5. Within DeepMind, he established the DeepMind Ethics & Society research unit, aiming to study the real-world implications of AI and promote ethical practices in the technology industry.

   
   

6. One of the founding members of the Partnership on AI — an organization set up in September 2016 to ensure that AI is developed safely, ethically, and transparently — along with Facebook's AI head Yann LeCun, Microsoft Research director Eric Horvitz, and several others.

   
   

7. Suleyman recently proposed a modern Turing test, according to Bloomberg, “to measure whether a machine has achieved ACI, you give an AI $100,000 and see if it can turn the seed investment into $1 million. To do so, the bot must research an e-commerce business opportunity, generate blueprints for a product, find a manufacturer on a site like Alibaba and then sell the item (complete with a written listing description) on Amazon or Walmart.com.” Suleyman expects AI will pass this more practical threshold sometime in the next two years.

Karén Simonyan

There is much less information about Karén Simonyan. Karén is not active on social media, he has no Twitter, a barely filled LinkedIn account, and a well-developed Google Scholar page.

Education & Career History:

• 🔬 Chief Scientist, Inflection AI (2022 – Present)
• 🔬 Research Scientist, DeepMind (2014 – 2022)
• 🔬 Postdoc, University of Oxford (2013 – 2014)
• 🔬 Ph.D. student, University of Oxford (2009 – 2013)

While doing his postdoc in 2013, in Oxford, Karén Simonyan along with Andrew Zisserman created the VGGNet image processing framework. VGGNet won the prestigious ImageNet Challenge. To commercialize it, they created a company Vision Factory AI, which was soon acquired by a not-very-known at that time startup DeepMind Technologies, where in 2014 Simonyan became a Principal Research Scientist. There, he played a key role in various AI breakthroughs, such as AlphaZero, AlphaFold, WaveNet, BigGAN, and Flamingo.

While in DeepMind, Karen authored and co-authored numerous publications, including five papers in Nature and Science, accumulating an impressive 180,000 citations. Since he co-founded Inflection AI, only one paper was published with Karén Simonyan as a co-author HiP: Hierarchical Perceiver.

That’s it for now. The information about Inflection AI will be constantly updated…

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