Inflection AI, a startup that makes a “kind and supportive” chatbot called Pi, has raised $1.3 billion in one of the largest funding rounds of Silicon Valley’s current artificial intelligence frenzy.
The deal values the startup at $4 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
“We’re actually building the largest supercomputer in the world today built on Nvidia’s H100 chips,” Chief Executive Officer Mustafa Suleyman said Friday on Bloomberg Television. “That’s obviously very expensive.”
Inflection AI’s co-founders include high-profile Silicon Valley figures. Suleyman was a co-founder of Google’s influential artificial intelligence lab, DeepMind. He started the company last year with Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock Partners.
The company also has a star-studded list of investors. Its new funding round was led by Hoffman, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Nvidia Corp. Nvidia’s stock has soared about 180% this year, thanks in part to demand for its chips to power AI.
Even in an era of investor obsession with AI startups, Inflection AI’s deal is remarkable in its scale. The funding round brings the total raised by the company to $1.53 billion, Inflection AI said Thursday. It did not disclose how much of the deal is cash, and how much is other forms of value, such as credits for technologies that power AI tools.
Inflection AI said it’s working with CoreWeave and Nvidia to build what it called the world’s largest AI computing cluster, with 22,000 of Nvidia’s H100 chips, which are intended for use with large language models in particular.
“In a few months time we will have increased the size of that cluster to be the second-largest supercomputer on the planet,” Suleyman told Bloomberg TV.
The CEO called personalized AI services “the most transformational tool of our lifetimes,” in a statement, adding, “This is truly an inflection point.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also enthused that the startup is using Nvidia technology to “deploy massive generative AI models that enable amazing personal digital assistants.”
The company’s chatbot Pi, which is an abbreviation of “personal intelligence,” is designed to be an assistant offering “text and voice conversations, friendly advice, and concise information in a natural, flowing style.”
Eventually, the technology will be able to execute real-world tasks, Suleyman said. “It will book appointments for you; it will plan holidays; it will buy things for you and be a scheduler,” he said.
--With assistance from Ed Ludlow.
(Updates with CEO comments starting in the third paragraph.)
