While top AI firms like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are spending billions of dollars on increasing the length of responses of chatbots, a Palo Alto based AI firm is spending billions on something different.
Meet Inflection’s Pi, the AI chatbot, designed to be friendly, warm and supportive.
It’s your friend when you need one. But it does have its boundaries and usually won’t cross the line. In the ocean of general-purpose chatbots, Pi is something different, something more personal.
The friendly way forward
Pi has all the features of a general purpose chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but there are some things that set it apart from the rest. It is said to have more human-like conversations and a high level of emotional intelligence.
Pi, standing for personal intelligence, provides a shorter response, just like how you chat with your friend. It’s inquisitive. Imagine spilling the beans on some hot gossip, Pi wants to know more, and leads the conversation forward by continuously asking follow up questions–Unlike ChatGPT, which gives a close-ended response.
It’s what users call “engaging”–more human-like interaction. Anyone would love a conversation which is engaging. Pi, doesn’t stop here. It’s also funny, adding humour to conversations. To make it even more human, it uses filler words like “Hmm” or “Uh-huh”.
The output of Pi is ‘memeish’, often using emojis and trying to tell jokes, according to a comparison study.
“It’s very balanced and even-handed on political issues or sensitive topics, but also sometimes it can be funny and silly and creative,” said Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of Inflexion AI and the man who led the team of Google’s DeepMind.
The chatbot “Pi” was released in May this year, and is prioritising to be a personal assistant for day-to-day tasks. Not suitable for long-form answers–one cannot ask Pi to write an essay, or an email.
What Makes it Human?
It is the data that it’s trained on. Inflection AI has said that its LLM is trained only using publicly available data and its proprietary data. The chatbot was made to generate text like a human. That is why it’s a little longer to generate a response compared to ChatGPT. It’s thinking!
ChatGPT is under criticism for stealing user data to train its large language models. It’s facing a class action lawsuit for this matter. Pi learnt from OpenAI’s mistakes and trained its LLM accordingly.
The one-year old start-up making generative AI more friendly, has huge backers. Tech behemoths like Microsoft and NVIDIA have recently invested in the AI firm’s fundraising round led by Microsoft, Redd Hoffmen, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt.
The company raised around $1.5 billion, and is valued at $4 billion.
Building Bridges
With its new investor, NVIDIA, the company plans to induct around 22,000 H100 GPUs to build one of the largest AI training facilities in the world. This is 3 times more compute power that was used to train GPT-4.
Inflection AI now has the money to do that. Most of the funding will be used to build a much more powerful foundation model.
They’re building a community of investors. The company does not want to take the conventional approach to raise money. They want to take a more personal approach by raising money from individuals and not VCs.
That’s why the majority of the stakes are held by the founders Mustafa Suleyman and Reif Hoffmen.
Although the company is in the big billion dollar club, it has a small team of 35 employees.
The team is infectious. It has fans from Microsoft and NVIDIA for their hard work and dedication on continuously improving Pi and releasing a much bigger one.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is extremely supportive of Inflection AI’s work, he said “the world-class team” at Inflection would help usher in “amazing personal digital assistants.”
Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO and co-founder of inflection AI sums up his sentiment about Artificial intelligence like how fans of basketball superstar, LeBron James feel about him when they watch him play—”“You can’t stop him, you can only hope to contain him.”
Suleyman was the co-founder of DeepMind–Google’s artificial intelligence lab.
Last year, he left Google and went on to start inflection AI with Linkedin’s co-founder, Reid Hoffman.
Reid Hoffman doesn’t need an introduction. A founding investor in OpenAI, co-founder of Deepmind and after investing in at least 37 AI startups, he began his next journey with inflection AI.
Users are already loving Pi for its friendly personality, helpful features, and seamless integration with other devices. inflection AI has the money, the people, and the support of the AI community to make their vision a reality. They are working hard to release the next generation of Pi, which will be smarter, faster, and more personalized than ever before. inflection AI is not just creating an AI assistant, they are creating a new way of living.
