[1/3]Taken on May 4, 2023, the words AI Artificial Intelligence can be seen in this illustration.Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
June 29 (Reuters) – Inflation AI, a startup backed by several Silicon Valley heavyweights, raised $1.3 billion on Thursday from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia, amid a boom in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. announced that it had acquired
The investment, a combination of cash and crowd credit, valued the company at $4 billion in its first year of existence, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Inflection released its chatbot Pi last month. Founded by Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, it focuses on building his AI products for consumers and is considered the biggest rival to OpenAI.
Pi uses generative AI technology similar to ChatGPT to interact with users through dialogue, allowing them to ask questions and share feedback. Inflection said he wants to build personal AI to help people plan, schedule, gather information and perform other tasks.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Inflection AI has approximately 35 employees. The company has raised $225 million in its first round in early 2022 from Greylock, Microsoft and Reid Hoffman.
The company released a report last week on the model that underpins the Pi, the Inflection-1, claiming it outperforms most models available.
Inflection chief executive officer Suleyman said most of the funding will be used to build computing power to develop stronger underlying models.
“We plan to build a cluster of about 22,000 H100s, which is about three times the amount of computation used to train all of GPT4. What we can build is speed and scale,” said Suleyman. Collision conference on Thursday.
Since the OpenAI bot ChatGPT went viral late last year, the AI field has been hailed as the next frontier in technology.
The industry has attracted multiple investors in the past few months as companies consider how to incorporate the technology into their businesses, while regulators also consider how to approach the technology.
Existing investor and rival OpenAI backer Microsoft (MSFT.O) also joined Inflation’s latest funding round.
NVIDIA (NVDA.O), which has recently stepped up its investment in AI, Hoffman, Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also participated in the latest round, Inflection said.
Reporting by Niket Nishant of Bengaluru and Crystal Hu of Toronto. Edited by Vinay Dwivedi and Conor Humphries
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