Inflection AI Shifts Strategy: Introduces Usage Caps on Pi Chatbot

Inflection AI will limit its free chatbot called Pi as it pivots to the enterprise

Driving the news: Inflection announced on Monday that will start imposing a rate cap for free usage of Pi. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Five months after Microsoft hired its founders, Inflection adds usage caps to Pi

Inflection will cap free access to its AI chatbot Pi in the coming months, the startup tells TechCrunch. Users can also now export their conversations off the AI chatbot, as the new CEO shifts the company's focus towards enterprise products. The usage caps come just a year after Inflection raised $1.3 billion to build out the "emotionally intelligent" AI chatbot. One of the lead investors in that deal, Microsoft, hired away Inflection's founders and most of its staff five months ago, paying $650 million to license its AI model and repay investors. At that time, Inflection said Pi had millions of weekly users. That deal has drawn attention from antitrust regulators in the US and UK, who are now investigating whether Microsoft was anticompetitive when it effectively ate Inflection alive. Since then, CEO Sean White has steered the gutted startup through this difficult post-acqui-hire phase. Two weeks ago, the company was planning to sunset Pi, an Inflection spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time -- understandable considering Inflection is more resource constrained than it once was. "We have to very carefully apply our resources," White told TechCrunch. However, those plans have since changed, and White now says the company is committed to keeping consumer Pi afloat. But Inflection aims to reduce the strain on its GPU resources by usage caps on the free chatbot, which Inflection says will mostly affect power users. As to the details of those caps, a spokesperson told TechCrunch that the "exact limits are still being determined." If that doesn't sound convincing, Inflection is also giving you a chance to move any important conversations with Pi off the chatbot. It's partnering with the Data Transfers Initiative to allow users to export their conversations off of Pi, or theoretically import conversations from other chatbots. White sees Inflection as setting a new standard for the AI industry in data mobility and transferability, hoping other companies will follow suit. Although, because Inflection is the first to do this, you can't actually import your conversations with Pi to ChatGPT or any other chatbots, you can just take them off of Pi. The path forward for Inflection may be in licensing AI models for companies to build into their own systems. White said 13,000 organizations have filled out an application showing interest in gaining API access to Pi. "Honestly, we don't have all the resources to deal with 13,000 requests, and so we've had to be fairly selective in who we start to work with," said White. He added that the company has held meetings with large banks, insurers, and several Fortune 500 companies about potentially using its enterprise products. White claims Inflection's fine tuning infrastructure allows it to customize AI models to specific organizations better than competitors. He hopes to announce the first enterprise products and partnerships in the fall.