inflection-ai
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Karén Simonyan and the Small Square That Helped AI See
He helped teach machines to see, then helped build the systems meant to talk back. From Oxford’s VGG network to Microsoft AI, Karén Simonyan’s career follows a question that keeps getting bigger: what should a model learn next?
Mustafa Suleyman and the Question Behind the Machine
The Microsoft AI chief began by listening to people one call at a time. Now he is trying to decide what billions of conversations with machines should be allowed to become.
Inflection AI
Inflection AI is a Palo Alto-based artificial intelligence company, structured as a public benefit corporation, founded in 2022 by Mustafa Suleyman, Reid Hoffman, and Karen Simonyan. Originally known for the empathetic consumer chatbot Pi and its Inflection large language models, the company was reshaped in March 2024 after Microsoft licensed its technology for roughly $650 million and hired most of its team. Under CEO Sean White, Inflection re-founded itself as an enterprise-focused AI provider, selling data-secure, customizable models (Inflection 3.0) that let organizations own their intelligence, data, and infrastructure - including an on-premises appliance developed with Intel.
Sean White
Sean White is the CEO of Inflection AI, the Palo Alto public benefit corporation behind the empathetic chatbot Pi. He took over in March 2024 after co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and most of the team left for Microsoft, and has since rebuilt the company around emotionally intelligent enterprise AI that runs on-premises. A Stanford- and Columbia-trained computer scientist with a deep background in augmented reality and wearable computing, White was previously Chief R&D Officer at Mozilla and head of the Interaction Ecologies Group at Nokia.
Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, helped build PayPal, seeded Facebook, and has been quietly central to almost every major tech breakout of the last 25 years. A philosopher-turned-venture-capitalist who popularized 'blitzscaling,' he is now betting big on AI — co-founding Inflection AI, launching Manas AI for drug discovery, hosting two podcasts, and writing bestsellers with GPT-4 as co-author.