Inflection AI sets off fireworks with $1.3B funding, highlighting surging interest in LLMs (and Nvidia H100s)

In a pre-July 4th weekend shock, Inflection AI, the Palo Alto-based startup based by Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind, and LinkedIn co-founder Reed Hoffman, introduced that it has raised $1.3 billion in an eye-popping spherical that brings its valuation to $4 billion.

Forbes reported that Microsoft and Nvidia led the spherical, together with Hoffman, Microsoft cofounder Invoice Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Nvidia was the one new investor — which is notable on condition that Nvidia and its service supplier CoreWeave labored with Inflection to develop Inflection’s present H100 cluster, and Inflection labored with Nvidia to assist fine-tune fashions on a current MLPerf check that set information on present AI mannequin coaching benchmarks.

The Forbes report additionally mentioned Nvidia and CoreWeave at the moment are serving to Inflection set up a cluster that can include a whopping 22,000 H100s — which Inflection believes to be the biggest GPU cluster for AI functions on the earth (even forward of Meta’s 16,000 GPU cluster announced in Could).

Does surging investor curiosity sign an AI bubble?

Not surprisingly, the surging investor curiosity in highly effective LLMs to create “private” chatbots has some already chattering about an AI bubble. Nic Carter, a basic associate at Citadel Island Ventures, mentioned, “AI is making the crypto bubble seem like little one’s play.”

Inflection AI raised $225 million when it launched one yr in the past

Inflection, which is just a yr previous, made eyes water proper from the start, when it introduced it had launched and already raised $225 million with plans to make use of AI to “generate language to just about human-level efficiency.” 

And late on a Friday afternoon in March, the Monetary Occasions reported that Suleyman and Hoffman have been seeking as much as $675 million in funding, despite the fact that they’d but to launch a product.

That rapidly modified: In Could, the corporate launched Pi, which it mentioned was named for “private intelligence” and was meant to be “empathetic, helpful and secure” — that’s, performing extra personally and colloquially than OpenAI’s GPT-4, Microsoft’s Bing or Google’s Bard, whereas not veering into the super-creepy. Throughout a panel final week on the Bloomberg Expertise Summit, Hoffman mentioned that the Pi chatbot takes a extra private, emotional strategy in contrast with ChatGPT. “IQ shouldn’t be the one factor that issues right here,” he mentioned. “EQ issues as properly.”

Final week, Inflection additionally introduced that it will launch a brand new LLM to energy Pi, known as Inflection-1, which it mentioned outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.