Artificial Intelligence start-up Inflection AI has made a huge leap forward in its growth trajectory. Less than two months after unveiling their debut chatbot named Pi, Forbes has reported that the Palo Alto-based AI firm has garnered a staggering $1.3 billion in funding. The colossal investment was led by Microsoft, Nvidia, and three of the tech industry’s most prominent figures: Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder; Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder; and Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO.
This article was written by Alex McFarland and originally published by Unite.AI.
Tying the Knot with Microsoft and Nvidia
Details of Inflection’s fresh agreement with Microsoft and Nvidia remain under wraps, with CEO Mustafa Suleyman opting not to disclose the cash-equivalent breakdown of the $1.3 billion raised.
Furthermore, Suleyman clarified that neither Microsoft nor Nvidia had control over the business equivalent to ownership, nor did they have any preferential rights. “There’s no IP movement, and we still are entirely independent and at liberty to do whatever we want on the commercial front, and partner with whomever we want. So there are no real restrictions,” he said.
What is apparent is the deepening relationship between Inflection, Microsoft, and Nvidia, both of whom are key players in the AI race. Microsoft serves as Inflection’s cloud computing partner while Nvidia has worked closely with Inflection in deploying its flagship H100 graphics processing unit (GPU), which currently sets the benchmark for AI training and powering extensive language models.
Unprecedented Computational Power and Future Endeavors
Inflection’s latest round of funding and its ongoing partnership with Nvidia and CoreWeave (a service provider that assists in the deployment of GPUs) are set to turbocharge its computational capacity. Inflection is gearing up to boost its current cluster of 3,584 H100 GPUs to an astounding 22,000 units. This impressive expansion is expected to make Inflection the world’s largest GPU cluster for AI applications, surpassing Meta’s 16,000 GPU cluster and potentially rivaling OpenAI’s deployment on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service.
Suleyman spoke highly of the partnership with Microsoft and Nvidia, “Microsoft has been amazing, they’re turbo-charging us, they are our anchor,” he said. “And as a result of our collaboration with Nvidia, we’ve been able to tune our cluster to get it to be the absolute best in the world. We can objectively say now that we have the very best hardware in the world.”
Following this monumental investment, Inflection plans to amplify its computing capabilities and further refine Pi. Suleyman noted that Pi has been witnessing “huge engagement” as it continuously evolves to provide more valuable interaction with users. Beyond Pi, Inflection is looking to launch an API for selected partners to create their own conversational AIs.
This latest funding round is testament to the growing investor confidence in AI technology, marking a significant milestone in Inflection AI’s journey to push the boundaries of AI-powered conversational interfaces.
