Inflection AI, a startup founded by one of DeepMind’s co-founders, has announced a new version of its chatbot Pi, which claims to perform as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT on various tasks. Pi, which has a warm and friendly tone, has also reached 1 million daily active users and 6 million monthly active users.
Inflection AI’s new model uses less compute than ChatGPT
Inflection AI’s CEO Mustafa Suleyman said that the new model, version 2.5, has been powering Pi for the majority of users in recent weeks. He said that the updated engine achieved these results while using only 40% of the training compute as ChatGPT, which is considered the state-of-the-art in natural language generation.
Suleyman said that Inflection 2.5 is better at things like math, college-level science and coding. “On all the major metrics now, we are neck and neck with ChatGPT for quality,” he told Axios.
Pi has a growing user base and a personal approach
Inflection AI also shared user metrics for the first time, saying that Pi has 1 million daily active users and 6 million monthly active users, who have now exchanged more than 4 billion messages with Pi. OpenAI announced last November that it had 100 million weekly active users.
Suleyman said that Pi’s user base has been growing at around 10% a week for the last two months. He attributed this growth to Pi’s personal approach, which differs from other chatbots that are trying to sell their services to both businesses and consumers.
Inflection pitches Pi as a highly personal chatbot that can help users with various goals, such as learning new skills, improving mental health, or having fun. Pi is free for now, though Inflection’s business model calls for revenue to come from its users, starting with a paid subscription.
Inflection AI has strong backing and ambitious plans
Inflection AI was founded by Suleyman, who was one of the co-founders of DeepMind, a leading AI research company that was acquired by Google in 2014. Inflection AI has received backing from billionaires Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt, among others.
Suleyman said that the 70-person company is always fundraising to continue its work. He also said that he would love to be able to charge users based on their progress, such as when they reach a particular goal they had set out inside of Pi.
He said that this idea is somewhat similar to how Sierra, another AI startup from Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, is charging its customers in a business context. Sierra gets paid for each customer service interaction that the AI is able to handle without human intervention.
