OpenAI rival Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion, Microsoft and Nvidia participated in the subscription

Article source: Metaverse NEWS

AI startup Inflection AI said on Thursday it had raised $1.3 billion from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia; one of the largest funding rounds in the current AI boom.

Text | Bian Chun

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). This is one of the largest funding rounds in the current AI boom.

The investment, which includes cash and support for cloud services, values the one-year-old company at $4 billion, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC.

01 OpenAI rival

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

Inflection released the chatbot Pi last month. Founded by Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, the company focuses on developing consumer-facing AI 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 create a personal AI tool that will help users plan, schedule, gather information and perform other tasks.

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

Inflection CEO Suleyman said most of the funds will be used to increase computing power to develop more powerful base models.

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

02 AI Investment Boom

After OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT caused a sensation at the end of last year, the AI field was hailed as the next technological frontier, triggering a wave of investment boom.

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

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