Sunday, 2 July 2023, Bengaluru, India
The AI-powered chatbot Pi’s creator, Inflection AI, has received an incredible $1.3 billion, bringing the company’s value to an estimated $4 billion. This is a good development for the startup.
This follows a succession of successful investments in the AI sector by IT heavyweights such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Microsoft and Nvidia, two IT behemoths, also backed the purchase.
Inflection received a flood of bids after releasing their ground-breaking chatbot Pi, which prompted this outstanding fundraising round.
In an interview with Forbes, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Inflection AI, said that when “Pi” verifies the central thesis—that communication is the new interface—”there’s so much more to do.” The startup has recently revealed Inflection-1, its first proprietary language model, which was trained “using thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs on a very large dataset” and is claimed to be on par with GPT 3.5, Chinchilla, and PaLM-540B.
With this funding, Inflection intends to improve Pi, a chatbot created to provide useful queries and responses through conversation. Suleyman stated that Pi’s engagement rates are rising as it becomes more honed and proficient at what it does, despite the company not disclosing user metrics.
Suleyman claims that Pi is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of conversational interfaces. Suleyman, though, believes that further financing will be available soon. However, venture investors are not required to apply this time.
Suleyman agrees that even while the expenses of developing AI models are falling, the total amount spent on them is rising as a result of the need for bigger models. Taking advantage of this possibly historic growth opportunity, Inflection intends to “blitz-scale” and aggressively raise money to support its quick growth.
With this investment, Inflection AI’s GPU cluster, which is already among the biggest in the world, is anticipated to experience a significant expansion. Inflection’s new cluster will grow to include 22,000 H100s as a result of the partnership with Nvidia and service provider CoreWeave, far exceeding Meta’s 16,000 GPU cluster. Equipment that is incredibly powerful and has lots of RAM is needed for AI training. As a point of comparison, the H100 features an incredible 80GB of vRAM, compared to the RTX 2060s 6GB (an average gaming GPU from 2019 that is still extensively used today). Now picture 22,000 of those chips interacting with one another.
In 2023, investors have been talking a lot about AI. All year long, the value of AI equities has skyrocketed (in both the hardware and software industries). To increase efficiency and investor appeal, IT companies are hastily incorporating AI into their goods and services. MosaicML, NoTraffic, and CalypsoAI, three AI firms, also raised a combined $2 billion earlier this week. In the history of AI startups, there has never been such a high degree of interest.
[Source of Information: decrypt.co]
