In the field of artificial intelligence, Microsoft has already achieved the goal of putting eggs in different baskets. Although OpenAI is still Microsoft's most famous partner, Microsoft is also constantly searching for other artificial intelligence solutions.
According to insiders on Thursday (March 21), Microsoft has agreed to pay $650 million to artificial intelligence startup Inflection AI, primarily to obtain authorization for its artificial intelligence software.
On Tuesday (March 19th), Microsoft also announced the hiring of co founders Mustafa Suleyman and Kar é n Simonyan from Inflection, as well as most of the company's 70 employees, shocking the artificial intelligence industry.
This unusual transaction is similar to a talent acquisition, but it is not really under the name of an acquisition. Analysis suggests that Microsoft's absorption behavior is essentially aimed at evading antitrust scrutiny.
Some legal and industry experts suggest that the deal between Microsoft and Inflection AI may still raise antitrust concerns among US regulators, who are increasingly reviewing the artificial intelligence investments and partnerships of large technology companies.
"Talent acquisition"
According to an insider, as part of the agreement, Microsoft will pay $620 million to obtain authorization for the Inflection AI model and approximately $30 million to waive any legal rights related to Microsoft's large-scale employment.
It is reported that since the company successfully received a $1.3 billion investment in June last year, its valuation has reached $4 billion. This also means that Microsoft spent only $650 million this time to indirectly "swallow" Inflection AI.
The personnel changes in this transaction are also worth mentioning. Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Inflection, will switch to Microsoft. Microsoft has also opened a new consumer AI department for him - Microsoft AI, and Suleyman will serve as the CEO of the department; Co founder Kar é n Simonyan, as the chief scientist of Inflection, was also heavily poached by Microsoft to join their new team. Accompanying Suleyman and Simonyan on their trip to Microsoft also included multiple engineers and researchers from the Inflection team.
After the personnel transfer, Inflection's official statement also proved that it had been essentially "hollowed out" by Microsoft.
Insiders point out that due to a significant decrease in the number of employees at the company, Inflection is attempting to offload some of its computing power; Another insider stated that the company is handling its relationship with its cloud computing partner CoreWeave.
Mustafa Suleyman, one of the founders of Inflection AI, can be considered a veteran figure in the field of artificial intelligence. In 2010, Suleyman and other partners founded the famous artificial intelligence laboratory DeepMind, which was later acquired by Google and became a backbone of Google's artificial intelligence research.
In 2022, Suleyman resigned from Google and chose to once again engage in the fierce competition of artificial intelligence startups. He co founded the Generative Artificial Intelligence company Inflection AI with Kar é n Simonyan.
Behind the transaction
Last year, as investor interest in chatbots surged, Inflection launched a robot called Pi, positioned as a better and more reliable personal assistant than its competitors.
According to data from the Infilcation official website, Pi already has 1 million daily active users and 6 million monthly active users, who have exchanged over 4 billion pieces of information with Pi; And the average duration of daily conversations between people and Pi reaches 33 minutes,
But Suleyman pointed out this week that Inflection has not been successful in finding an effective business model.
At this point, Microsoft offered it an olive branch, although this meant that Inflection would plan a new path, but Inflection could still retain its proprietary technology. In addition, this transaction is expected to provide Inflection investors with a complete investment return.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Inflection stated that it has the ability to provide services to companies including Microsoft. "Our success in training, customizing, and improving the performance of large-scale artificial intelligence models puts us in a unique and advantageous position to become an artificial intelligence platform for global enterprises."
In terms of personnel allocation, Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman will continue to serve as a director of Inflection; The new CEO of Inflection will be Sean White, who previously served as the Chief R&D Officer of Mozilla, a Firefox browser developer.