Inflection AI founder and CEO abandons the company after raising $1.3B to join Microsof

Inflection AI Co-founders Move to Microsoft AI

“It seems Microsoft is moving its focus from OpenAI. They have just hired two of Inflection AI’s co-founders, Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan, to head Microsoft AI including products like Copilot, Bing, and Edge. The third co-founder Reid Hoffman will stay in Inflection AI’s Board. Here’s the chain of events and what happens next:

1. Microsoft invested $1.3 billion in Inflection AI in June 2023 to enable the company to develop its own AI supercomputer with 22,00 H100 GPUs.
2. Soon, Inflection AI released Infection 2 LLM which powers their empathetic chatbot Pi, very competitive with the GPT models in terms of performance on industry benchmarks. However, even with further Inflection iterations, it seems the company was not able to grab user traction.
3. Ripping apart Inflection, Microsoft has hired Inflection AI’s talent and now Inflection AI will pivot to focus on its AI Studio for developing custom generative AI models specifically tailored for commercial customers.
4. Also, Inflection 2.5 LLM will soon be available on Microsoft Azure so that the company’s technology can be more widely distributed and accessible to creators, developers, and businesses worldwide. This move is crucial for facilitating the development and fine-tuning of custom AI models for commercial clients as part of the AI studio service. Their API will also be up soon.
5. With the co-founders’ departure, Inflection AI welcomes Sean White as its new CEO. White, with his extensive experience in technology and innovation from companies like Mozilla and Nokia, along with board membership in several tech companies, will steer Inflection AI into this new chapter.”