The AI Assembly Line Ends With Microsoft, Google and Meta
The surprise takeover of promising AI startup Inflection shows how quickly innovation is being captured by a handful of tech players.
All your AI chatbots are belong to Microsoft.
Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg
It’s almost impossible for an artificial-intelligence startup to build anything as good as ChatGPT, but Inflection was getting there.
Last year the Palo Alto, California-based firm raised $1.3 billion in a single fundraising round to turn its chatbot Pi into a personal assistant for everything. It built up a phenomenal cache of computing power, gaining access to thousands of coveted graphics-processing unit chips from Nvidia Corp. and was on track to surpass OpenAI’s free version of ChatGPT with a model it had built, remarkably, from scratch. Compared to most startups, Inflection’s path to success looked smooth. So it came as a shock to the industry on Tuesday when Inflection announced that its co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, along with most of its employees, were joining investor Microsoft Corp. as employees, and that Suleyman would lead the software giant’s consumer AI business.