Inflection caps its Pi chatbot amid enterprise pivot
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Inflection AI announced rate limits for Pi — its consumer chatbot — and is supporting a new tool it hopes will become an industry standard for exporting chatbot data.
Why it matters: The move comes as Inflection pivots to business after CEO Mustafa Suleyman and other employees left for Microsoft.
Driving the news: Inflection announced on Monday that will start imposing a rate cap for free usage of Pi.
- CEO Sean White told Axios he believes Inflection can meaningfully lower its GPU usage without impacting too many of its users.
- "There are some folks who are doing many, many messages a minute and doing that for hours at a time," he said. "At least for a free product, those will be the ones that are capped and limited."
Inflection is also working with the Data Transfer Initiative to develop a mechanism for exporting data from chatbots, something both organizations hope could pave the way for an eventual industry standard.
- Starting immediately, Inflection said Pi users will be able to export their conversation history for their own archives, to use with another LLM or with Inflection's own upcoming enterprise product.
Catch up quick: Microsoft announced in March that it had hired Suleyman to run its consumer AI effort along with Inflection co-founder Karén Simonyan and a number of other employees.
- Inflection said at the time it would "lean into" its custom generative AI model business, with a new focus on enterprise customers.
Yes, but: While the rate limits may not be welcome news for those who have been accustomed to using Pi as much as they want, it's still a better outcome for Pi enthusiasts than it could have been.
- Until very recently, Inflection was considering phasing out the consumer version of Pi entirely.
- "We were thinking about how we might at least take down certain areas or markets or make different adjustments," White told Axios. "Right now, I don't think we need to."
- The company is smaller than the 50 to 70 people it had at the beginning of the year, White said. "We're not quite up at the size that Inflection was back in January, but we're starting to get closer," he said.
The big picture: Inflection's effort to chart a path forward as a smaller independent company represents an important test for a new type of deal that has become something of a trend — hiring key talent and licensing technology and giving a startup's investors a return on their investment, all without purchasing the company itself.
- Microsoft isn't the only one trying this approach. It's become the popular new way for large tech companies seeking to gain a startup's know-how and talent without the regulatory challenges that accompany all-out acquisitions.
- Earlier this month, Google hired two of Character.AI's co-founders — Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas — along with two dozen of its researchers. It also bought a non-exclusive license to Character.AI's technology and guaranteed a healthy return for investors in the startup.
- Similarly, Amazon said in June it was hiring several leaders from AI agent startup Adept and licensing that company's technology. Adept said it would continue operating with a more narrow mission.
- Regulators, including the FTC, have said they are looking into these deals to determine whether they've been designed to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
What's next: Inflection is working on just what its proposition will be for businesses. In addition to allowing more access to its API, the company is exploring ways to allow businesses to run Inflection's technology on premise.
