AI startup Inflection AI said Thursday it has raised $1.3 billion from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia amid a boom in artificial intelligence (AI). It's one of the largest funding rounds in the current AI boom.

The investment, which includes cash and cloud services backing, values the company, which is only a year old, at $4 billion, a person familiar with the matter told media.

01 OpenAI's arch rival

Inflection AI is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and has about 35 employees. The company raised $225 million in its first funding round in early 2022 from Greylock, Microsoft and Reid Hoffman.

Inflection, which launched its chatbot Pi last month, was founded by Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and Collage co-founder Reid Hoffman and is focused on developing consumer-facing artificial intelligence products and is considered OpenAI's number one competitor.

Pi uses generative AI technology similar to ChatGPT to interact with users through conversations, allowing people to ask questions and share feedback. inflection says it wants to build a personal AI tool that helps users plan, schedule, gather information and perform other tasks.

Last week, Inflection released a report on its large language model, Inflection-1, which powers Pi and claims that the model outperforms most existing models on the market.

Inflection CEO Suleyman said most of the funding will be used to enhance the computing power to develop a more powerful base model.

"We will build a cluster of about 22,000 H100 chips. That's about three times the amount of computation used to train all of GPT4. The speed and scale will really allow us to build a differentiated product," Suleyman said Thursday at a technology conference.

02 AI investment boom

After OpenAI's ChatGPT, a chatbot, caused a stir late last year, the AI field was hailed as the next technological frontier, sparking a wave of investment.

Microsoft is not only an investor in Inflection, but has also invested in its competitor OpenAI.

Inflection said that NVIDIA has recently increased its investment in the AI field. In addition, Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others, have also participated in the latest round of investments.

AI startup Inflection AI said Thursday it has raised $1.3 billion from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia amid a boom in artificial intelligence (AI). It's one of the largest funding rounds in the current AI boom.

The investment, which includes cash and cloud services backing, values the company, which is only a year old, at $4 billion, a person familiar with the matter told media.

01 OpenAI's arch rival

Inflection AI is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and has about 35 employees. The company raised $225 million in its first funding round in early 2022 from Greylock, Microsoft and Reid Hoffman.

Inflection, which launched its chatbot Pi last month, was founded by Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and Collage co-founder Reid Hoffman and is focused on developing consumer-facing artificial intelligence products and is considered OpenAI's number one competitor.

Pi uses generative AI technology similar to ChatGPT to interact with users through conversations, allowing people to ask questions and share feedback. inflection says it wants to build a personal AI tool that helps users plan, schedule, gather information and perform other tasks.

Last week, Inflection released a report on its large language model, Inflection-1, which powers Pi and claims that the model outperforms most existing models on the market.

Inflection CEO Suleyman said most of the funding will be used to enhance the computing power to develop a more powerful base model.

"We will build a cluster of about 22,000 H100 chips. That's about three times the amount of computation used to train all of GPT4. The speed and scale will really allow us to build a differentiated product," Suleyman said Thursday at a technology conference.

02 AI investment boom

After OpenAI's ChatGPT, a chatbot, caused a stir late last year, the AI field was hailed as the next technological frontier, sparking a wave of investment.

Microsoft is not only an investor in Inflection, but has also invested in its competitor OpenAI.

Inflection said that NVIDIA has recently increased its investment in the AI field. In addition, Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others, have also participated in the latest round of investments.