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Inflection AI’s Second Act With CEO Sean White

With Pi Journeys, Sean White is reviving Inflection AI’s original consumer ambitions while pushing a new idea: A.I. that supports relationships rather than replacing them.

In 2022, early in the first wave of generative A.I., DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn co-founder turned venture capitalist Reid Hoffman launched Inflection AI, billing it as an attempt to build an emotionally intelligent A.I. The company’s core product was a chatbot called Pi, “purely designed for relaxed, supportive, informative conversation,” Suleyman said at the time. The startup quickly attracted backing from Microsoft, Nvidia, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt and reached a $4 billion valuation when it was barely a year old.

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Less than a year later, in March 2024, however, its core team dissolved. Microsoft hired Suleyman and much of Inflection’s founding team in one of the A.I. industry’s first major acqui-hires. Microsoft paid the startup about $650 million, largely to compensate its investors, according to Reuters. The only person who didn’t leave was Hoffman, who remains on Inflection’s board. He tapped Sean White, a computer scientist who formerly led R&D at Mozilla, as the startup’s new CEO.

Taking over a once-high-flying A.I. startup after most of its founding team has left can sound a little like rebuilding a house from the dust of its demolition. Inflection hasn’t raised new funding and now operates with a staff of roughly 60. After the upheaval, the company shifted much of its focus to enterprise customers. But its original consumer product, Pi, has also continued to evolve quietly.

Last month, Inflection signaled a renewed push into consumer A.I. with the launch of Inflection AI Labs and its first experiment, “Pi Journeys,” a chatbot designed to help users navigate different stages of life, from starting a new career to caring for aging parents.

White spoke with Observer about rebuilding Inflection after its dramatic reset, his vision for........

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