I 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.
They 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.
The 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 arenāt successful as an independent venture funded research lab.
I can think of 4-10 other large vc funded operations in this boat.
Between this and the Mistral deal (thatās currently under investigation by the EU), Microsoft looks to be really trying to get back into the monopoly business with AI.
Is Microsoft AI the thing that Altman was going to be in charge of in the short lived agreement he had with MS?
I 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.
How 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 ādevelop 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 generationsā. > 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/
This space is moving so fast and itās hard to keep track of SotA. How are management even keeping track? I suppose MSFT has enough cash to buy āem all.
I'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.
This 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
Related MS blog post:
Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot
Wow. This is surprising. Not even an acquihire. Iām very curious about what happened internally to lead to this.
Could 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.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The Silicon Valley TV series desperately needs a reboot.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/03/19/mustafa-suleyman...
The real story here I think.
Who gets the GPU clusters...?
It 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 $200M at most.
I talked to Pi for one New York minute and it came up with the good ole āAhhh the X Y of Zā LLM-ism. So much for an unique conversational tone.
The series of events are more 'sketch' and smell worse than the OpenAI / Altman thing. This feels like a corporate war strike / competitor assassination. PI is AMAZING and its latest v2.5 model was only on the market for like a week before this shit went down. I say something in the new tech made massive stakeholders in M$ 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/1108047623623020575/12218898363...
Feels dark. Totes nonsensical. Fishy as fuk.
How is it ok to start a company, hire people with big promises - and then leave them in a lurch ?
Ugh. I dislike almost everything in this press release. Way to do all the wrong things, Inflection...
Inflection on deathwatch now?
Wasn't Mustafa kicked out of deepmind/Google due to harassment allegations? Seems like a pretty pathetic move from MSFT.
Nice website design.
> As part of this, weāre 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.
Ah, PR. Buzzword buzzword buzzword ... second screen ... "two of our three co-founders ... will be leaving Inflection to start Microsoft AI",
Pretty 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.
The 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 Empireās continued dominance.
Is 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.
So sounds like the real news is that Microsoft basically acquihired the Inflection founding team?