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The New Inflection
- bugglebeetle 3y agoBetween this and the Mistral deal (that’s currently under investigation by the EU), Microsoft looks to be really trying to get back into the monopoly business with AI.
- baq 3y agohe who controls the spaice, controls the universe, after all.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoMicrosoft has been in the monopoly business since at least 2001.
- fnbr 3y agoWow. This is surprising. Not even an acquihire. I’m very curious about what happened internally to lead to this.
- riku_iki 3y agono more money left..
- tfehring 3y agoIt would be extremely poor form for founders to intentionally leave their startup at this stage to take another job. In all likelihood they were pushed out by the board. My guess is that the founders were all in on Pi, their conversational language model, and investors lost confidence in their ability to build a sustainable venture-scale company on the ~4th best AI chatbot.
- GaggiX 3y agoI've been using their new model for a few days and it works surprisingly well, it's also free and works in the EU. I don't know how I feel about Microsoft's involvement here.
- m_ke 3y agoNo traction, was probably clear they didn't have a shot at growing the consumer side.
- GaggiX 3y agoThey have +1 mln daily users.
- azinman2 3y agoWhat’s the curve like
- GaggiX 3y ago+10% every week in the last two months, as reported by Mustafa Suleyman. Edit: sources: https://inflection.ai/inflection-2-5 https://inflection.ai/inflection-2-5 and https://www.axios.com/2024/03/07/inflection-ai-chatgpt-openai-comparison https://www.axios.com/2024/03/07/inflection-ai-chatgpt-opena... I can not comment more or edit previous comments that are not this one, rip.
- riku_iki 3y agowith capital investments required to keep them afloat, it may be not enough.
- DreamGen 3y agoWhat's your source on this? They just very recently reached 100K downloads on Android and according to various SEO tools, they get maybe ~4M visits per-month (and these tend to overestimate, plus it's monthly visits, not DAU).
- rvz 3y agoIt appears that Inflection AI made no sense to begin with and Pi was quite frankly a performative research demo and didn't generate enough money for the VCs to justify another fundraising round. How is Inflection AI worth $4BN? What can Pi do that is unique over the best of cloud LLMs and the hundreds of $0 free LLMs out there? It appears that it is a vehicle for VCs to quickly run this company to the ground for a quick exit, knowing that this company is extremely overvalued. Probably after this acqui-hire, the value of Inflection AI is now down to its real value of $200M at most.
- telltruth 3y agoMy guess is that Mustafa wanted to sell to MSFT at 10X but MSFT didn’t wanted pay that kind of money. Mustafa was ok with fire sale but VCs were greedy. Mustafa then quite in rage.
- kcorbitt 3y agoSo sounds like the real news is that Microsoft basically acquihired the Inflection founding team?
- nexuist 3y agoI hope one day we can drop the corporate facade so these blog posts can be two to three sentences of "Our company sucked. Microsoft wanted to give me a fuck ton of money. I decided to take it. Some other guy is in charge now. Good luck!"
- gcnnbdff 3y agoA lot of people don’t know this but all these VC valuations are fake, they had this planned years ago to fake growth.
- f6v 3y agoMaybe someone try training an LLM to do just that.
- bee_rider 3y agoDoes getting acquhired by MS imply your company sucked? There are things I like about where I’m at but if MS really wanted to they could send enough dump trucks full of cash to ruin the local traffic situation. Is it worth staying at a place if you can’t even get out of the driveway to get to your favorite little cafe?
- hinkley 3y agoIt means your people are good and your product isn’t. That requires a kind of cognitive dissonance that some people would call “suckage”. Certainly had that conversation many, many times. Just be careful you aren’t Boeing buying McDonell Douglas, where the cut throat culture infected the host and killed it, rather than being muted and managed out.
- dbish 3y ago
- telltruth 3y agoThey had raised massive amount and not from good patient investors. No traction means Mustafa got fired. This is not surprising though but what is surprising is MSFT picked him up. The guy is not technical, is not even visionary and had just got lucky hanging out with Demis. I would think Satya had better taste.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoNever underestimate the power of soft/social skills.
- rqtwteye 3y agoThat’s where the real money is. Even the best technologists won’t make it very far if they don’t know how to play politics.
- shermantanktop 3y agoOne person’s “politics” is another person’s “demonstrate basic empathy and understand that your point of view is not universal.” Yes, there are creatures who have no real skills other than navigating political currents. But there are also creatures who can’t understand that technical brilliance is no excuse for utter social cluelessness.
- gator123 3y agoI swear there needs to be an emotional maturity course or something in university
- shermantanktop 3y agoThat's the secret of higher education! Forget about the coursework, forget about the social aspect, forget about exposure to ideas. The actual value of universities is that you keep kids busy during the time when they are potentially destructive, and when they pop out they are now magically older and can handle some basic adulthood-on-training-wheels expectations. And yet a few hundred years ago we had 14-year-olds in the mines of Cornwall supporting whole families.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago> As part of this, we’re thrilled to announce that we will now host Inflection-2.5 on Microsoft Azure helping us get it into the hands of creators everywhere. Hahah. You know, the word 'creator' has truly become co-opted by consumerism and greedy bigcorps. What a lot of posts like this never mention is one of the primary uses of AI: to make more efficient the system of trying to get us to buy even more things we don't need. I mean, who are we kidding? In a well-balanced life, we shouldn't need or even interact with personal AIs. We should slow down and appreciate what we have and seek for simplicity. If there's too much data to be handled in business, it means business is not going in the right direction, not that we need new tools to handle it. If we are pressured to write more, then we are creating things not of true value but merely to amuse. If we feel like becoming more efficient is a good thing, it simply is an extension of the original psychological manipulation of advertising demanding MORE for the industrial machine. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking this garbage is something good.
- airstrike 3y agoIt's hard to agree with most of what you said without starting from the big assumption that "capitalism is bad" and "being anti-capitalism is a virtue" Becoming more effective in and of itself simply means becoming more productive, which means creating goods and services with less, which means more "welfare" to people If people are being convinced to buy shit they don't need, that's a separate issue. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater In my well balanced life, I love interacting with LLMs. I also appreciate the things I have all of the time, without needing to slowing down technological progress to do so
- vouaobrasil 3y ago> In my well balanced life, I love interacting with LLMs. I also appreciate the things I have all of the time, without needing to slowing down technological progress to do so Okay that's fine, but you are not the rest of the world. While you enjoy the ultimate fruits of capitalism, there are people in developing countries suffering because of it through a lack of freedom and a destructiom of the landbases that they could once depend on. When climate change comes because of consumerism, it is you and other well-off people that will be able to move first. OF COURSE, you will disagree with me, because you are probably at the apex. (Just the very fact that you have a well-balanced life means you are close to it, proportionally speaking to the entire human population.) I don't claim that all capitalism is bad BTW. Rather, what I claim to be bad is global capitalism where other considerations have been eliminated or decimated.
- Aerbil313 3y agoThe only inflection I see here is Microsoft single-handedly dominating global tech industry and its future after its years in sleep. US DoD must have been really worried about the US Empire’s continued dominance.
- unethical_ban 3y agoUh-huh. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple are has-beens. A plausible theory with less coordination required: Microsoft is a large company with lots of money attempting to regain competitive advantages against their rivals through acquisition.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoWhile that's a true story today, Satya is brutally outplaying Google, Amazon is a utility company and Apple's domain is hardware and will likely continue to be. Mark is making some good strategic plays to keep the field even, but Microsoft really is poised to clean up as AI takes off.
- danpalmer 3y agoMicrosoft is poised to do well, sure, but they're currently beholden to Nvidia for hardware and OpenAI for models, and their main surface area for products is Office, Azure, and to a lesser extent, Outlook. Comparatively, Google controls their hardware, Google builds their models, and Google has Search, Workspace, Gmail, Android, Cloud, and YouTube, all of which could have significant AI investments. I'm not saying Satya isn't doing a great job, he really is, and I have many criticisms of Google's approach, but I do think Google is at least equally well positioned, and possibly better positioned.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoI agree that TPUs are a huge competitive edge. That and huggingface integration is going to let google do very well serving open models until other competitive hardware comes online. The problem is that I think the window to capitalize on TPUs isn't going to be long enough to cement any sort of dominance, and they're fumbling so badly now that I don't have faith in the leadership.
- darth_avocado 3y agoIs tech hiring great? No. Is it the absolute worse it can be? Also no. Internship or apprenticeship instead of tech interviews are just take home tests that last multiple months, and that is a huge waste of time. Yes, broken interview system currently rewards people who interview more, but when you combine it with other signals like resume, project presentations and other things, the chances of hiring bad candidates are low. Yes, you miss out on a lot of great candidates, but that is not a problem that big tech companies need to solve. Besides, not knowing the status of your employment 3-6 months down the line is not a great thing for candidates.
- Analog24 3y agoInternships are definitely not a waste of time. First of all, they pay well in and of themselves (at least in tech). Second of all, most internships are filled by students on their summer break. What better use of that time than getting an inside view of a company they might want to work for? From the companies perspective it gives them a much better idea of how well the candidate performs and how they fit in at the company, giving much higher confidence in a hiring decision that could lead to significant future impact.
- darth_avocado 3y agoI think you misunderstood. Internships for students during the summer definitely makes sense. However, i was talking about internships/probation as a way to evaluate candidates instead of interviews. Meaning if you are a staff engineer with 10+ years of experience, you’re still going to be hired conditionally for 3-6 months to see if you’re good enough for the team. I personally find that very prone to abuse.
- bcopa 3y agoPretty mind-boggling how ChatGPT wrapper apps built by dev houses in Poland are absolutely crushing it, while Pi failed to gain any traction despite raising billions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BoorishBears 3y agoMore mind-boggling they raised billions to do something any LLM can do with some prompts (be more personable)
- Pandabob 3y agoHave not heard of these. Where can I learn more about them?
- toisanji 3y agoexamples please
- dbish 3y agoWhich?
- lumost 3y agoThe interesting emphasis to me is commercial customers. They are acknowledging that the competition to be the nth gpt vendor is too stiff for them, and they aren’t successful as an independent venture funded research lab. I can think of 4-10 other large vc funded operations in this boat.
- lvl102 3y agoThis space is moving so fast and it’s hard to keep track of SotA. How are management even keeping track? I suppose MSFT has enough cash to buy ‘em all.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoState of the art is still GPT-4? Others are playing catch up or hitting very similar benchmarks
- andy99 3y agoIs Microsoft AI the thing that Altman was going to be in charge of in the short lived agreement he had with MS?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mupuff1234 3y agoWasn't Mustafa kicked out of deepmind/Google due to harassment allegations? Seems like a pretty pathetic move from MSFT.
- Animats 3y agoAh, PR. Buzzword buzzword buzzword ... second screen ... "two of our three co-founders ... will be leaving Inflection to start Microsoft AI",
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gwern 3y agoWho gets the GPU clusters...?
- ShamelessC 3y agoDo they own their GPU clusters?
- gwern 3y agoYou don't train GPT-3+ models or serve millions of users off Amazon spot instances, that's for sure! And whatever arrangement they have is likely transferrable or salable.
- ShamelessC 3y agoYeah I’m aware I just didn’t know if they had something in house or leased from an HPC provider (not spot instances - although honestly that sort of thing wouldn’t surprise me from some other company like Stability).
- nabakin 3y agoI have some serious issues with this company's PR. They say their Inflection-2.5 model is the world's best personal AI[0] which is a dumb claim to make considering it is done off of automated benchmarks which we know are flawed and even if you assume automated benchmarks are good enough to claim that title, it would be held by dozens of other open weight models on HF, not Inflection-2.5. They said their Inflection-2 model was the second best in the world[1] while comparing it to Palm-2 which no one considers close to the best in the world. They again, based their claim on automated benchmarks which anyone knowledgeable in the space would know can be gamed and is not representative of actual conversational performance. (take a look at the Lmsys Arena Leaderboard for a better metric) They list other models they consider good while failing to mention or compare to Mixtral 8x7b, the best open model that exists. And they introduce buzzwords no one in the area uses like IQ and EQ as if they are innovative concepts. Making big, bold claims without evidence is the exact kind of manipulative PR speak I'd expect from a company with little to no substance. [0] https://inflection.ai/inflection-2-5 https://inflection.ai/inflection-2-5 [1] https://inflection.ai/inflection-2 https://inflection.ai/inflection-2
- posix86 3y agoAgreed, read a few sentence & move on.
- Leary 3y agoExactly, honestly I think their business model could work if they have a GPT-4 level model for subscription.
- RaftPeople 3y ago
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRelated MS blog post: Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39757330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39757330
- ashvardanian 3y agoI've said it before, and I'll say it again. The Silicon Valley TV series desperately needs a reboot.
- joshmarinacci 3y agoI don't know about Inflection, but their new CEO is a great leader who I've worked with in the past. Just having him on board raises their status significantly in my mind.
- kazinator 3y agoThis kind of PR pep talk is not a good place to go on a tangent about how three of your co-founders bolted to Microsoft do do AI stuff there. #lolwtf
- intellectronica 3y agoCould this be related to the recent news that Apple is in advanced stages of choosing Google as its AI provider? Maybe the last hope for Inflection was to become Apple's AI provider and when that fell through it was time to put an end to the misery.
- vineyardmike 3y agoThis has only helped their small odds of becoming Apple’s provider. You can’t serve the LLM for every iOS device in the world without a big pile of inference machines and the only companies that fit that bill are Microsoft, Google, and Meta.
- syntaxfree 3y agoI talked to Pi for one New York minute and it came up with the good ole “Ahhh the X Y of Z” LLM-ism. So much for an unique conversational tone.
- htrp 3y agoInflection on deathwatch now?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- camilamacedo 3y ago[dead]
- patcon 3y agoUgh. I dislike almost everything in this press release. Way to do all the wrong things, Inflection...
- llIIllIIllIIl 3y agoNice website design.
- ronhav3 3y agoHow is it ok to start a company, hire people with big promises - and then leave them in a lurch ?
- Sandra90 3y ago[dead]
- sarimkx 3y agohttps://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/03/19/mustafa-suleyman-deepmind-and-inflection-co-founder-joins-microsoft-to-lead-copilot/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/03/19/mustafa-suleyman... The real story here I think.
- windbag 3y agoThe series of events are more 'sketch' and smell worse than the OpenAI / Altman thing. This feels like a corporate war strike / competitor assassination. PI is AMAZING and its latest v2.5 model was only on the market for like a week before this shit went down. I say something in the new tech made massive stakeholders in M$ frantic and panic and deploy a rapid strike team NOW! Before people actually catch wind of how amazing it is/way. Some chatter about this on PI's Discord --> https://discord.com/channels/1108047623623020575/1221889836345069759 https://discord.com/channels/1108047623623020575/12218898363... Feels dark. Totes nonsensical. Fishy as fuk.
- windbag 3y agoHow is Inflections "Public Benefit Corporation" and "legal status" play here, and how are the lawyers dancing around that entity type (delaware registration, looks as if). "This is why we decided to make Inflection a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). It means we have a legal obligation to run our AI studio in a way that balances the financial interests of stockholders, the best interests of people materially affected by our activities, and the promotion of our specific public benefit purpose. That purpose is to “develop products and technologies that harness the power of AI to improve human well-being and productivity, whilst respecting individual freedoms, working for the common good and ensuring our products widely benefit current and future generations”. > https://inflection.ai/an-inflection-point https://inflection.ai/an-inflection-point TITLE 8 Corporations CHAPTER 1. General Corporation Law Subchapter XV. Public Benefit Corporations > https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/ https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/
- windbag 3y agoLOL the authors of that Inflection Blog Post about their PBC status is literally stated as being: Mustafa Suleyman, Reid Hoffman, Karén Simonyan.