Valued at over $1.5 billion! Is AI unicorn Inflection collectively "poached" by major investor Microsoft?
Last year, Inflection raised $1.3 billion in a financing round led by Microsoft, becoming one of the highest-valued AI startups in Silicon Valley. In less than a year, the core members of this AI startup were collectively poached by Microsoft
On Tuesday local time, Microsoft announced that Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, co-founders of the startup Inflection, will be leaving the company to join Microsoft and establish a new team called "Microsoft OpenAI". This new team will integrate Microsoft's consumer OpenAI work with products such as Copilot, Bing, and Edge.
Suleyman will serve as the Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft OpenAI, while Simonyan will be the Chief Scientist.
The statement mentioned that several key employees from Inflection, including OpenAI engineers, will also join this department. Some media reports have indicated that a significant number of Inflection employees have already joined Microsoft.
It is worth noting that Microsoft was previously a major investor in Inflection. Last year, in a round of financing led by Microsoft, Inflection raised $1.3 billion, bringing its total funding to $1.525 billion, second only to OpenAI among AI startups.
At that time, Inflection ambitiously announced plans to build the world's largest AI cluster, equipped with 22,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, gaining significant attention.
In less than a year, the core members of this rising star in OpenAI have been collectively recruited by Microsoft.
Reid Hoffman, another co-founder of Inflection, will stay behind to work with the new CEO, Sean White, to salvage the remaining assets of the company.
Hoffman, also the founder of LinkedIn, stated in a release:
This agreement with Microsoft means that all of Inflection's investors will receive good results today, and I expect there will be good growth opportunities in the future.
However, a source familiar with the matter told the media that these "good results" do not include investors receiving cash from the company through partial exits.
Pi's Future Path
Inflection is adjusting its business focus to provide API services to other enterprises, planning to deploy its APIs on Microsoft's cloud services and other cloud service providers' platforms.
This shift represents a significant strategic adjustment for Inflection, which had been dedicated to developing its own chatbot Pi.
Nevertheless, Inflection has assured that the "millions" of weekly active users of Pi will still be able to use Pi services in the short term without any changes being made to the service According to Inflection's idea, users can interact with Pi through multiple platforms as if having a normal conversation, and it will remember you and your previous conversations to make it more personalized and useful.
However, Pi has never truly achieved this, unable to change the landscape where ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude dominate the chatbot market. Previously, Pi was seen as a strong competitor to these three chatbots.
During a media interview on Tuesday, Suleyman emphasized that Pi's daily user count has reached 1 million, but it has not yet found an effective business model.
Key members collectively leaving, is Inflection facing difficulties? Will Microsoft benefit again?
As for Microsoft, what role does this tech giant play in this transaction? Is it the savior of an excellent OpenAI entrepreneurial team? Or a dominating presence like Thanos?
Referring to the example of OpenOpenAI, it experienced a fierce "palace fight" in November last year. At that time, OpenOpenAI founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were fired by the company and then hired by Microsoft. Although they eventually chose to return to OpenOpenAI, Microsoft still gained additional influence in this shining OpenAI startup.
Regarding Inflection, according to the latest reports from the media, up to now, the situation has developed in a way similar to OpenOpenAI, but without revealing too many details.
Whether Suleyman's departure signals difficulties for Inflection or if bigger opportunities are emerging is currently unclear. Suleyman was a co-founder of DeepMind, later acquired by Google, but left in 2022 due to allegations of overly aggressive management style.
It is worth noting that at the end of last year, Clément Delangue, the CEO of another multi-billion-dollar AI startup Hugging Face, predicted that by 2024, at least one heavily promoted AI company would either be acquired or still be in the process of being acquired