Latest news with #InflectionAI
The Hindu
3 days ago
- Business
- The Hindu
OpenAI and Microsoft: A partnership under strain
A 'head over heels' relationship between a tech titan and an AI startup that began over six years ago is turning sour. Microsoft and OpenAI's pact powered the startup's artificial intelligence engine to build generative pre-trained models and de-aged the software maker for the AI era. Now — after cumulative investments swelling to $13 billion — the couple is battling between mutual reliance and burgeoning autonomy. This recalibration carries weighty implications for both firms. Recent reports suggest Microsoft is prepared to halt discussions over the future contours of its OpenAI alliance if disagreements on critical terms — like Microsoft's future equity stake — persist. The Windows software maker would then rely on its existing commercial contract, ensuring access to OpenAI's technology until marks a potential inflexion point in a relationship that saw Microsoft's capital and cloud infrastructure propel OpenAI to the vanguard of AI. Heart of the matter At the heart of the current negotiations are fundamental differences in strategic outlook. OpenAI has been overtly seeking to lessen its dependency on Microsoft for cloud computing, a move underscored by new partnerships. Notably, OpenAI finalised a deal in May to use Google Cloud's infrastructure, a significant step to diversify its computing resources beyond Microsoft's Azure —its current exclusive provider. It has also partnered with CoreWeave and is exploring arrangements with Oracle as part of Project Stargate to further expand its compute capacity. Such diversification provides OpenAI with technical alternatives and, presumably, greater negotiating leverage. The shifting personal ties between the firms' leaders, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sam Altman of OpenAI, mirror these corporate recalibrations. Once in near-constant communication, with Mr. Nadella reportedly texting Mr. Altman five or six times a day, their interactions have become more formalised, primarily consisting of scheduled weekly calls, per news reports. This devolution from spontaneous chats to structured exchange began after Mr. Altman's brief ousting from OpenAI in late 2023 — an event that led Mr. Nadella to rearchitect his company's AI future. While Mr. Nadella backed Mr. Altman, the Microsoft CEO also made his controversial decision to bring DeepMind's Mustafa Suleyman on board. At that point, Mr. Suleyman was running Inflection AI. And as part of the deal, the entire team at Inflection AI joined the software maker. Despite these undercurrents, public pronouncements remained diligently choreographed. Earlier this year, Mr. Altman posted a picture with Mr. Nadella on X, announcing the next phase of their partnership to be 'much better' than anyone is ready for. Mr. Nadella echoed the optimistic sentiment. Such displays were aimed at reassuring investors amidst intricate private negotiations and mounting competition from other AI players, as well as increasing regulatory scrutiny globally. A pivotal point A pivotal point of disagreement between the duo is OpenAI's corporate structure. In May, OpenAI announced it would restructure into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), while keeping its non-profit parent in control, retaining the authority to appoint board members . This was a significant shift from earlier considerations of a more conventional for-profit transition that might have diluted the non-profit's oversight and authority. The move, amidst criticism from OpenAI early investor and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was aimed to better align its operational structure with its stated mission of developing AI for humanity's benefit, while still attracting substantial investment. This restructuring requires Microsoft's assent as a key stakeholder — with the tech giant having provided billions of dollars in funding. Microsoft is said to be negotiating the size of its own potential stake in this new PBC, with discussions reportedly ranging from 20% to 49%. Failure to finalise this restructuring by year-end could jeopardise funding from other investors, including a significant investment from SoftBank. Broader AI strategy Microsoft, for its part, is not standing still. Its AI strategy is visibly broadening beyond its OpenAI relationship. At its Build 2025 conference, Microsoft showcased integrations of models from Anthropic and Musk's xAI, signalling a move towards a more diversified AI portfolio. The company is also developing its own smaller, in-house models, like Phi-4, to reduce costs and reliance on any single provider for its Copilot services. This reflects a growing confidence in its proprietary capabilities and a desire to offer a wider range of AI tools on its Azure platform. Indeed, Microsoft's ability to leverage its existing agreement with OpenAI until 2030 offers it strategic latitude. But the evolving Microsoft-OpenAI dynamic unfolds against a fiercely competitive AI landscape. Both entities are balancing the fruits of their collaboration against the imperatives of strategic independence and market differentiation. Microsoft's potential willingness to pause talks and OpenAI's multi-cloud strategy both signal a relationship that is turning sour. The denouement of these negotiations will not only chart the future courses of the two firms but also establish significant precedents for partnerships, governance, and commercialisation in the rapidly maturing AI domain. The relationship, once a lodestar for AI collaboration, now offers a salient lesson in managing the intricate dance of shared ambition and diverging paths in an industry perpetually remaking itself.
Business Insider
29-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Reid Hoffman says AI can't be your friend — and pretending it can is harmful
LinkedIn cofounder and AI investor Reid Hoffman is sounding the alarm on a growing trend in the tech world: AI systems being marketed as your new best friend. "I don't think any AI tool today is capable of being a friend," Hoffman said in a Wednesday episode of the Possible podcast. "And I think if it's pretending to be a friend, you're actually harming the person in so doing." His comments came amid Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's push to embed AI companions across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and even Ray-Ban smart glasses. Last month, Zuckerberg told podcaster Dwarkesh Patel he sees AI chatbots as part of the solution to America's so-called loneliness epidemic. He cited statistics suggesting that the average American has "fewer than three friends" but has the capacity for 15. According to a 2021 report from the Survey Center on American Life, 49% of Americans report having three or fewer friends. But Hoffman drew a sharp distinction between companions and friends, saying that blurring that line erodes what it means to be human. "Friendship is a two-directional relationship," he said. "Companionship and many other kinds of interactions are not necessarily two-directional. And I think that's extremely important because it's the kind of subtle erosion of humanity." He said his theory of friendship was "two people agree to help each other become the best versions of themselves," a dynamic that involves not just emotional support, but also accountability — something no chatbot can reciprocate. "It's not only, 'Are you there for me?', but I am here for you." Hoffman praised design choices like Inflection AI's Pi assistant, which explicitly tells users, "I'm your companion," and encourages people to spend time with actual human friends. "Helping you go out into your world of friends is, I think, an extremely important thing for a companion to do," he said. As tech companies race to deploy more emotionally intelligent bots, Hoffman argued for more transparency and regulation. "We as a market should demand it, we as an industry, all MPAs, should standardize around it," he said. "And if there's confusion around this, I think we as government should say, 'Hey, look, if you're not stepping up to this, we should.'" For Hoffman, the stakes are high. "I think that's a degradation of the quality of elevation of human life," he said. "And that should not be what it's doing." Hoffman isn't alone in raising the alarm on AI companions. During a Senate testimony earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced similar concerns about AI forming personal bonds with children. When asked whether he'd want his own child to form a best-friend bond with an AI bot, he said, "I do not." He said that while adults might seek emotionally supportive relationships with AI, children require a "much higher level of protection" in how these systems interact with them. "These AI systems will get to know you over the course of your life so well. That presents a new challenge and level of importance for how we think about privacy in the world of AI," said Altman, who became a father in February.
Forbes
16-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Enterprise AI: Tailored, Secure, And Built For Business Impact
Why create an AI model focused solely for the enterprise? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Sean White, CEO at Inflection AI, on Quora: Creating an AI model for enterprise isn't just about developing a standalone model – it's about building a comprehensive ecosystem that addresses the unique challenges and requirements of large organizations. Let me break this down into several key points: First, enterprise AI requires a sophisticated architecture and orchestration system tailored to specific business needs. This isn't a one-size-fits-all solution; it's about creating an infrastructure that can seamlessly integrate with existing enterprise systems while maintaining scalability and reliability. Second, the most effective AI models for enterprise are those trained on organization-specific data. Your company's data is unique – it contains institutional knowledge, industry-specific insights, and operational patterns that generic models simply can't capture. Your employees and teams are domain experts who understand the nuances of your business, and their expertise should be reflected in your AI systems. Third, privacy and security are paramount in enterprise environments. Organizations need to maintain control over their intellectual property and sensitive information. This often means deploying AI systems on-premises or in dedicated Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). When you develop enterprise-focused AI, you're not just building models – you're creating secure systems that protect and preserve organizational intelligence. Finally, enterprise AI needs to go beyond simple information retrieval or "book reports." It requires true conversational intelligence that can engage with complex business scenarios, understand context, and provide actionable insights. This means developing models that can interpret industry-specific terminology, understand company protocols, and engage in meaningful dialogue with employees across different departments. In essence, enterprise-focused AI is about creating a complete solution that addresses the technical, data, security, and practical needs of large organizations while leveraging their unique strengths and protecting their assets. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Forbes
16-04-2025
- Forbes
Conversational AI: Merging IQ And EQ For Smarter Dialogue
Conversational AI Concept - Natural Language Processing - NLP - Computational Linguistics Concept - ... More AI-based Virtual Assistant Generating Voice as a Soud Wave How do we make AI conversationally intelligent, and why does that matter? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Sean White, CEO at Inflection AI, on Quora: Creating truly conversationally intelligent AI requires developing systems that possess both IQ (cognitive intelligence) and EQ (emotional intelligence). While AQ (Action Quotient - the ability for agents to take meaningful actions) is also crucial, we'll focus on these two fundamental pillars. Understanding IQ in AI Systems In AI, cognitive intelligence manifests as a sophisticated interplay of capabilities that enable meaningful discourse. An AI system must process and understand complex information while engaging in logical reasoning and demonstrating advanced problem-solving abilities. This means maintaining coherent dialogue across multiple conversation turns, synthesizing information from various sources to form well-reasoned conclusions, and identifying patterns that lead to appropriate generalizations. The system must also handle abstract concepts and hypothetical scenarios while demonstrating memory of previous interactions to create continuity in conversations. The Essential Role of EQ in AI Emotional intelligence in AI systems transcends basic sentiment analysis. It's not about creating emotions in AI but rather about creating systems that can truly understand and respond to the emotional undercurrents of human interaction. This involves reading and appropriately responding to emotional cues, showing genuine empathy and understanding of human experiences, and adapting communication styles based on the user's emotional state. Through these capabilities, AI systems can manage the emotional dynamics of conversation while building authentic rapport and trust with users. Why Conversational Intelligence Matters The importance of conversational intelligence extends far beyond creating more pleasant interactions. Research consistently shows that humans learn more effectively, retain information better, and make superior decisions when engaged in quality conversations. This occurs because good conversations activate deeper cognitive processing through engagement, create emotional connections that enhance memory and understanding, and enable collaborative thinking that leads to creative problem-solving. The natural flow of dialogue fosters critical thinking in ways that more structured interactions cannot match. Moreover, we're increasingly discovering that humans co-evolve with our technologies. A telling example of this phenomenon can be observed in homes with AI assistants, where families have noticed children dropping social niceties like "please" and "thank you" during interactions with these systems. This observation highlights how our interactions with AI can profoundly shape human behavior and social norms. The development of more conversationally intelligent AI can help create better communication patterns throughout society, support more productive and meaningful interactions, and foster healthier organizational cultures through improved human-AI interaction. Perhaps most importantly, it can help preserve and enhance important social skills rather than diminishing them through oversimplified interactions. Inflection's Approach to Conversational Intelligence At Inflection, our years of dedication to developing sophisticated systems and frameworks for conversational intelligence reflect our deep understanding of these principles. We've gathered over 10 million examples using specialized tools from experts in various fields, creating a unique and extensive dataset that informs our approach. By integrating this rich collection of conversational knowledge with our frontier-scale foundation models, we've been able to deploy advanced conversational capabilities across our platform. This commitment to developing truly conversational AI stems from our understanding that the future of human-AI interaction depends not just on raw computational power, but on creating systems that can engage in meaningful, emotionally intelligent dialogue. These systems should enhance rather than diminish human capabilities, serving as partners in our continued growth and development as a society. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Bloomberg
20-03-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
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. From the moment they'd founded it 18 months earlier, there had seemed something can't-miss about Inflection. Hoffman was perhaps the best-connected person in Silicon Valley. 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. Inflection's founders defined success as expanding that user base into hundreds of millions, and ultimately billions, of people. Their oversize ambition, and that of their investors, was a company whose value might top $1 trillion. 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.
