Microsoft and Nvidia invest $1.3 billion in Inflection AI

Inflection AI, a firm backed by numerous Silicon Valley giants, announced on Thursday that it has raised $1.3 billion (about Rs. 10,670 crore) in funding from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia, amid a surge in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

According to Reuters, the investment, which included cash and cloud credit, valued the one-year-old firm at $4 billion (roughly Rs. 32,840 crore).

Last month, Inflection introduced its chatbot Pi. It was founded by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google DeepMind, and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, with the goal of developing consumer-facing AI solutions. It is considered a major competitor to OpenAI.

Pi, like ChatGPT, use generative AI technology to communicate with users through conversations, allowing them to ask questions and provide comments. Inflection stated that it intends to develop a personal AI that would assist humans in planning, scheduling, gathering information, and doing other duties.

Inflection AI, situated in Palo Alto, California, employs around 35 people. Greylock, Microsoft, and Reid Hoffman invested $225 million (about Rs. 1,850 crore) in the company in early 2022.

It produced a study last week on its model Inflection-1, which drives Pi, and claims it outperforms other models on the market.

According to Suleyman, chief executive of Inflection, the majority of the funds will be utilised to increase processing capacity in order to establish a more robust foundation model.

"We'll be constructing a cluster of approximately 22,000 H100s." This is around three times the amount of computation required to train all of GPT4. "What will really enable us to build a differentiated product is speed and scale," Suleyman said at the Collision Conference on Thursday.

After OpenAI's bot ChatGPT became a viral phenomenon late last year, the AI area has been heralded as the next frontier for technology.

In recent months, the industry has attracted multiple investors as corporations look for ways to incorporate the technology into their operations and authorities consider how to deal with the technology.

Microsoft, an existing investor and supporter of rival OpenAI, took part in Inflection's newest funding round.

Nvidia, which has lately increased its AI investments, Hoffman, Bill Gates, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt all joined in the new round, according to Inflection.