AI Unicorn Inflection Abandons Its ChatGPT Challenger As CEO Mustafa Suleyman Joins Microsoft

The maker of chatbot Pi had raised $1.3 billion a year ago. Suleyman will now lead Microsoft’s consumer AI efforts as Inflection pivots to a business-to-business focus.Mustafa Suleyman is leaving Inflection AI, the maker of chatbot Pi, for Microsoft in a massive shakeup at one of Silicon Valley’s highest-valued artificial intelligence startups. Inflection, valued last year at $4 billion,, forming a new group called Microsoft AI that includes its Copilot product.

Inflection will focus now on providing an application programming interface, or API, to other businesses — a major shift for a company that had focused until recently on Pi, its chatbot alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. It will host that API on Microsoft’s cloud service as well as others, the source added. In its own post, Inflection claimed that PI had “millions” of weekly users.

Building powerful AI models to compete with the likes of OpenAI is expensive. Still, for Inflection to exit the consumer race so quickly — after having raised so much money, so fast — while its CEO departs for a top job at Microsoft, raised some eyebrows among insiders, even if it didn’t fully surprise.

At Index Ventures, Mike Volpi, a board director at another AI model unicorn already focused on business-to-business growth, Cohere, said he expected “Big Tech” companies like Microsoft to be the beneficiaries of the consumer AI horse race. The enterprise side is “much more viable” to hold its own, he added, name-checking Cohere and another prominent AI unicorn, Anthropic. “A lot of AI companies that were focused on consumer will try to move over to the enterprise market.

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