Inflection AI launches out of stealth
The company, structured as a public benefit corporation, announced Pi, a conversational assistant it described as a supportive companion rather than a search or productivity tool.
- Labs & people
- Minor
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s co-founder, and Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, both formerly of DeepMind, came out of stealth with Inflection AI, announcing a chat assistant called Pi — short for “personal intelligence.” The founders framed Pi not as a search engine or productivity tool but as a conversational companion, describing it as able to act as “coach, confidante, creative partner or sounding board,” and positioned the launch as a moment comparable to the arrival of the internet, in which computers would increasingly learn human language rather than the reverse.
The company had been founded the previous year but revealed little publicly until this announcement. It structured itself as a public benefit corporation, a legal form that requires balancing shareholder returns against a stated public purpose, which Inflection described as building AI that improved human well-being and productivity. A limited beta of Pi followed within days, with a broader public release in May 2023.
Inflection entered a field that, weeks after GPT-4 and months after ChatGPT, already had OpenAI, Google and Anthropic competing on general-purpose assistants, but it staked out a narrower premise — an assistant optimised for supportive conversation rather than raw capability. Suleyman and Simonyan later left the company to lead a new Microsoft consumer AI division, in an unusual arrangement that saw most of Inflection’s staff move with them.