Artificial intelligence has quickly become one of the hottest tech sectors, with startups raising billions at an astonishing pace. One such startup, Inflection AI, may take the cake: Palo Alto-based Inflection received $1.3 billion from Microsoft and Nvidia as funding – this marks its fourth-biggest raise without multiple rounds!
Inflection AI’s newly raised capital will be invested into further developing their conversational chatbot Pi, which has seen “huge engagement” since its debut early May. Furthermore, Inflection AI plans to utilize their investment to increase computing capabilities; according to CEO Mustafa Suleyman of Forbes this company plans on “blitz-scaling” its growth as it pursues what he sees as an historic opportunity in AI.
Microsoft and Nvidia as investors as well as billionaires Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt all back the start-up backed by them as major shareholders are backing it now, giving evidence of AI’s growing prominence and interest.
But Inflection AI stands out from other AI startups with its hardware setup. The company boasts what they claim is the world’s largest GPU cluster for training AI models: 3,584 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs currently comprise the cluster, but through partnership agreements with Nvidia and CoreWeave service provider they plan on expanding this to 22,000 GPUs – enough for powering an entire supercomputer cluster second only to Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Inflection AI believes this massive cluster is essential to its ambitions in the AI conversational assistant market, which it considers the future of human-computer interactions. Bots will become an integral part of people’s everyday life as they ask and receive answers without even realizing it! Inflection AI envisions these bots replacing search engines, productivity apps and other services; people simply asking questions will receive responses without even thinking twice!
To achieve this goal, Inflection AI strives to make its technology as accessible as possible to developers and businesses looking to implement AI-powered conversations of their own. They offer API access so select partners can use Pi’s conversational model; eventually they hope to give these partners the capability of building custom AIs on top of its platform.
That could become an enormous business as more consumers embrace the concept of talking to their computers. A survey conducted earlier this year by Accenture revealed that Americans expect to spend $1.5 trillion per year by 2035 on AI services. AI will only become more accessible with companies investing in it; thus, this investment from Microsoft and Nvidia provides Inflection AI a great boost towards reaching this goal. Money raised will allow the company to ensure it can continue improving its Pi conversational model, which it believes to be on par with high-end AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and Google’s PaLM-540B. Their latest results released earlier this week demonstrated this fact with simulated back-and-forth conversations using this model outperforming rivals in tests designed to measure AI understanding natural language.
