In June 2023, the company raised US$1.3 billion at $4 billion valuation.[7]
In March 2024, Suleyman and Simonyan announced their departure from the company in order to start Microsoft AI, with Microsoft acqui-hiring nearly the entirety of its 70-person workforce.[8] As part of the deal, Microsoft paid Inflection $650 million to license its technology. The proceeds were used to reimburse Inflection AI's investors.[9] UK's Competition and Markets Authority launched a preliminary probe into the deal to examine the impact on competition and whether the agreement constituted a merger.[10] The regulator concluded that the deal amounted to a "merger situation," but did not pose a threat to competition due to Inflection's small share in the UK consumer market.[11]
Products
The first product released widely by Inflection AI is a chatbot, Pi, named for “personal intelligence,” that is intended to function as an artificial intelligence-based personal assistant.[12] Among the user experience goals that the company has stated for the Pi product are: providing an experience of emotional support for human users, in which the chatbot should be able to maintain an interactive text or voice-based dialogue with a human user that includes elements of kindness, a diplomatic tone about sensitive topics, and humor.[13] Comparisons and contrasts have been made between the Pi chatbot and ChatGPT, a chatbot created by OpenAI.[14]