Inflection AI launches Pi, a personal AI chatbot

Inflection AI launched Pi, a conversational assistant the company described as “kind and supportive,” accessible through a chat app and website. Inflection had been founded the previous year by Mustafa Suleyman, a DeepMind co-founder, alongside Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder, and Karén Simonyan, formerly DeepMind’s chief scientist for large models.

Pi’s positioning set it apart from the assistants OpenAI, Google and Microsoft were racing to ship that spring. Rather than emphasising task completion, code generation or search, Inflection framed Pi around empathetic listening, “friendly advice” and conversation in a “natural, flowing style,” explicitly closer to a companion than a tool. The company said the model was tuned through human feedback to be supportive and to stay within careful behavioural boundaries, and that it would keep improving through use.

The launch came a day before Chegg’s stock collapsed over fears that free chatbots would erode paid products, and in the same week that Google and OpenAI were both pushing new consumer releases — evidence of how crowded, and how fast-moving, the general-purpose chatbot market had become barely six months after ChatGPT’s debut. Inflection’s approach proved commercially difficult to sustain independently: the company raised a further round weeks later, but by March 2024 most of its staff, including Suleyman and Simonyan, had moved to Microsoft under a licensing arrangement that left the original company a shell. Pi continued operating afterwards under Inflection’s remaining leadership, pivoted toward enterprise use.