This is big and puzzling news.
It will undoubtedly relaunch the debate on a possible bubble in artificial intelligence, the fashionable new technology.
AI proponents will reiterate that the technology is revolutionary because it's "a way to make everything we care about better," as the legendary investor Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, put it in a recent blog post.
It is true that ChatGPT, the conversational robot developed by the startup OpenAI, won over the public when it was launched last November.
The ChatGPT chatbot, which provides human-like responses to even complex requests, has changed the way internet search is perceived. ChatGPT showed that artificial intelligence has reached a point where technology can perform certain tasks much better than humans can.
It does not, however, prevent questions from being raised.
Inflection AI: $1.3B Raised; Valuation Reported $4B
Inflection AI, a startup created last year by Mustafa Suleyman, the former leader of DeepMind -- the AI startup now owned by Alphabet's Google (GOOGL) -- has just raised $1.3 billion in new funding, the AI studio said in a statement. This amount brings the valuation of the startup to $4 billion, according to reports, just one year after its inception.
Inflection AI did not provide its valuation in its statement.
The new funding round attracted the who's who of tech. Microsoft (MSFT) Co-Founder Bill Gates, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman personally took part in the round. Microsoft, which had already invested in Inflection AI, also invested.
Finally, the AI studio counts as a new investor the hot company of the year: Nvidia also becomes, through this fundraising, an investor of Inflection AI.
The firm did not give details on the new funding, in particular how much of the $1.3 billion was cash and how much was in-kind products and services provided to Inflection AI. The startup also did not detail the positions of each of its investors.
The Palo Alto, Calif., startup said the fresh funding would support its efforts to further build and design Pi.ai. That's said to be a personal AI, a kind and supportive companion, offering text and voice conversations, friendly advice, and concise information in a natural, flowing style.
Personal AI: Bot and User Better Engage
Pi aims to rival ChatGPT, but with more engagement between bot and user, according to Inflection AI.
"Personal AI is going to be the most transformational tool of our lifetimes," said Suleyman, co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI. "This is truly an inflection point. We’re excited to collaborate with Nvidia, Microsoft, and CoreWeave as well as Eric [Schmidt], Bill [Gates] and many others to bring this vision to life."
In a tweet, the firm said that the new funding would "help us accelerate our mission to make personal AI available to every person in the world."
In addition to the chatbot, the AI studio also develops graphics processing unit calculation clusters for AI training and large language models, the technology that powers chatbots like ChatGPT.
A computer cluster is a collection of independent computers called nodes, which work together to enable global management and to overcome the limitations of a single computer. In fact, it is a kind of supercomputer.
Launching a calculation simultaneously on several computers considerably reduces calculation time, which represents a real gain in productivity, according to experts.
Microsoft is already Inflection AI's cloud computing partner in the AI arms race, while the startup was previously working with Nvidia on the H100 GPU, the processor which the chipmaker uses to power current AI tools. Inflection AI co-develops the H100 cluster in partnership with Nvidia and CoreWeave, a firm that helps physically deploy GPUs.
Nvidia and Microsoft Comment on Inflection AI
"A powerful benefit of the AI revolution is the ability to use natural, conversational language to interact with supercomputers to simplify aspects of our everyday lives,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.
"The world-class team at Inflection AI is helping to lead this groundbreaking work, deploying Nvidia AI technology to develop, train and deploy massive generative AI models that enable amazing personal digital assistants.”
Kevin Scott, Microsoft's chief technology officer and Executive vice president of AI, said that Inflection AI was among companies that "are pioneering the industry with transformative products that are accessible, easy to use, and show the many possibilities of AI.”
In all, Inflection AI has already raised $1.525 billion. Indeed, before the $1.3 billion, the startup had managed to obtain $225 million in a first round of funding in early 2022 from Gates, Schmidt, Hoffman, Microsoft and other influential investors.
The current AI arms race has skyrocketed demand for the processors, which are needed to drive the large language model technologies behind it. This, therefore, makes companies developing graphics cards and supercomputers attractive.
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