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. Founded by
Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn co-founder Reid
Hoffman, it focused on building consumer-faced AI products and is considered a
top rival of OpenAI.
Pi uses generative AI technology, similar to ChatGPT, to
interact with users through dialogues, allowing people to ask questions and
share feedback. Inflection said it wants to build a personal AI that will help
people plan, schedule, gather information and perform other tasks.
Palo Alto, California-based Inflection AI has about 35
employees. It raised $225 million in a
first round of funding in early 2022 from Greylock, Microsoft and Reid Hoffman.
Last week, it released a report on its model Inflection-1,
which powers Pi, and claims it has outperformed most models available.
Most of the funding will be used to build computing power to
develop a more powerful foundation model, according to Suleyman, chief
executive at Inflection.
"We'll be building a cluster of around 22,000 H100s.
This is approximately three times more compute than what was used to train all
of GPT4. Speed and scale are what's going to really enable us to build a
differentiated product," Suleyman said at Collision Conference on
Thursday.
The AI space has been hailed as the next frontier for
technology after OpenAI's bot ChatGPT became a viral sensation late last year.
The industry has drawn several investors in the past few
months as corporates examine ways to integrate the technology into their
businesses, while regulators have been mulling over how to tackle the
technology.
Microsoft, an existing investor and also backer of rival
OpenAI, participated in Inflection's latest fundraise.
Nvidia, which has stepped up its AI investments recently,
Hoffman, Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also participated in the
latest round, Inflection said. © Reuters
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