AI Chatbot Startup Rockets to $4 Billion Valuation With Microsoft, Nvidia Backing - Decrypt

AI Chatbot Startup Rockets to $4 Billion Valuation With Microsoft, Nvidia Backing – Decrypt

Time Stamp: June 29, 2023 3:16 PM

Inflection AI, the promising startup behind the AI-powered chatbot Pi, has successfully raised an impressive $1.3 billion, significantly boosting the value of the company to an estimated $4 billion.

This comes hot on the heels of a series of lucrative investments in the AI industry, with tech giants Microsoft and Nvidia backing the deal alongside tech titans like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Notably, Nvidia has emerged as the sole new investor in the group.

Following the launch of their groundbreaking chatbot Pi, Inflection was swamped with offers, leading to this impressive funding round. “There’s so much further to go after [Pi] validates the core thesis, which is that conversation is the new interface,” Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman remarked in an interview with Forbes. The startup also recently unveiled its first proprietary language model, Inflection-1, which is said to be on par with GPT 3.5, Chinchilla, and PaLM-540B and was trained “using thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs on a very large dataset” according to a paper produced by the company.

Image: Inflection AI

Though Suleyman remained cryptic about the specifics of the funding, he assured that a “very, very large chunk” was in liquid dollars, but didn’t say exactly how much. The round didn’t come with control-claiming conditions or restrictions, preserving Inflection’s freedom to forge new commercial partnerships. Suleyman emphasized, “There’s no IP movement, and we still are entirely independent.”

Inflection plans to use this funding to enhance Pi, a chatbot designed to generate valuable questions and answers through interactive dialogue. While the company didn’t share user metrics, Suleyman confirmed that Pi’s engagement rates are soaring as it becomes more refined and better at what it does.

According to Suleyman, Pi is just the tip of the iceberg, signifying the future of interfaces through conversation. However, Suleyman anticipates more funding in the near future. This time though, venture capitalists need not apply. In his words, “Our network and reach isn’t something that regular VCs can help accelerate.”

Suleyman acknowledges that while the costs of training AI models are shrinking, their absolute spending is growing due to the need for larger models. Embracing this potentially historic growth opportunity, Inflection plans to “blitz-scale” and raise funding aggressively to fuel its rapid expansion.

In the wake of this investment, Inflection AI’s GPU cluster, already one of the world’s largest, is expected to undergo a massive expansion. The collaboration with Nvidia and service provider CoreWeave will see Inflection’s new cluster swell to include 22,000 H100s, vastly outpacing Meta’s 16,000 GPU cluster. AI training requires extremely powerful equipment, with a lot of RAM. Just as as comparison, an RTX 2060 (an average gaming GPU from 2019, still widely used today) has 6GB of vRAM, whereas an H100 boasts a whopping 80GB. Now imagine 22.000 of those chips working together.

AI has been the conversational topic among investors in 2023. AI stocks (for both hardware and software businesses) have been spiking throughout the year. Tech businesses are furiously integrating AI into their products and services to boost efficiency and investor appeal. Earlier this week, AI startups MosaicML, NoTraffic, and CalypsoAI also raised a combined $2 billion in recent rounds. This level of interest is unparalleled in the history of AI startups.

Considering the moment AI startups are living, one thing is abundantly clear: the appetite for AI is insatiable, with no signs of slowing down.

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