An AI Startup Couldn’t Beat Microsoft. So It Joined Them

Reid Hoffman sat down with Mustafa Suleyman in the fall of 2023 to talk about the uncertain future of their startup, Inflection AI. Suleyman, who co-founded DeepMind and sold it to Google for $650 million in 2014, was a star in his own right, as was Inflection’s other co-founder, Karén Simonyan, a top researcher in the field. Inflection’s product, a chatbot named Pi, had quickly attracted millions of monthly users by communicating a sense of emotional intelligence. The startup founded in a garage or a friend’s living room only to grow into tech’s next Google or Facebook had always been the essence of Silicon Valley. Yet artificial intelligence called into question whether it was even possible for a startup like Inflection to follow that path, given generative AI’s voracious demand for resources.