The New Inflection
inflection.ai
inflection.ai
There are things I like about where I’m at but if MS really wanted to they could send enough dump trucks full of cash to ruin the local traffic situation. Is it worth staying at a place if you can’t even get out of the driveway to get to your favorite little cafe?
Just be careful you aren’t Boeing buying McDonell Douglas, where the cut throat culture infected the host and killed it, rather than being muted and managed out.
Companies like Microsoft have consumed countless startups and startup employees over the decades and are practiced at digesting them without being changed all that much.
Could probably do it now with a browser plugin and the right llm prompt. Perhaps call it the un-BSifier.
>Inflection is changing its business model again, now trying to sell its AI services to commercial clients after realizing people can't replicate their AI model. They're losing two co-founders to Microsoft and bringing in some new CEO to run the show. They claim nothing will change for users, but who knows what will happen with all these changes going on.
* Inflection shifts focus to AI studio business, developing custom AI models for commercial use.
* Plans to host Inflection-2.5 on Microsoft Azure, with plans for other cloud platforms.
* API launch soon, sign-ups for early access open.
* Co-founders Mustafa and Karén to start Microsoft AI, leaving Inflection.
* Sean White appointed new CEO; Reid Hoffman remains on board.
* No immediate changes to Pi service; privacy and data policies unchanged.
Pi (their chat bot) is pretty nice to talk to. It’s really good with the whole para-social aspect of chatting without being weird. Is that useful? Maybe for research, probably less so for a direct product.Microsoft can probably get something useful from that.
More importantly though, Microsoft is now hosting a whole suite of LLMs on Azure. This is the lesson they learned after OpenAI had that acute leadership crisis. This is another hedge against OpenAI. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft start distancing themselves from OpenAI in the future.
Mustafa Suleyman is the ultimate AI grifter.
He has ZERO technical skills. ZERO hardcore STEM background. He was just friends with Demis at the right time and road that hype train.
At Google he had a similar role VP of AI products or something and he contributed nothing (except all the garbage ethics, safety crap that didn't help google, probably kneecapped it actually)
This is Satya Nadella's worst AI move yet.
If you ask engineers to sell linear algebra, they invent things like control systems, which are too tricky to sell.
Yes. Inflection's AI was just too useless and safe to be of any use and ultimately made no money.
> This is Satya Nadella's worst AI move yet.
We'll see. But I predict that Inflection AI will eventually sunset Pi.
They say their Inflection-2.5 model is the world's best personal AI[0] which is a dumb claim to make considering it is done off of automated benchmarks which we know are flawed and even if you assume automated benchmarks are good enough to claim that title, it would be held by dozens of other open weight models on HF, not Inflection-2.5.
They said their Inflection-2 model was the second best in the world[1] while comparing it to Palm-2 which no one considers close to the best in the world. They again, based their claim on automated benchmarks which anyone knowledgeable in the space would know can be gamed and is not representative of actual conversational performance. (take a look at the Lmsys Arena Leaderboard for a better metric)
They list other models they consider good while failing to mention or compare to Mixtral 8x7b, the best open model that exists.
And they introduce buzzwords no one in the area uses like IQ and EQ as if they are innovative concepts.
Making big, bold claims without evidence is the exact kind of manipulative PR speak I'd expect from a company with little to no substance.
The quality of our product is so high, it is being compared to a perfect diamond the size of the entire solar system. But, we are humble, and while we think our tech is pretty darn good, we know that we can do better. That's why we are introducing v2 in just 2 business days from today, which will render all other forms of intelligence (human and artificial) irrelevant."
It really captures what I felt as I started to read this PR bullshit. I fed it through an LLM to summarize it, and there was no substantive content in that summary.
Lampooning aside, the sobering reality is that a tiny number of people are acquiring O($10^8) wealth (or more) via such shenanigans, and that is the reason we will see a lot more of this.
I'm not even talking for porn purposes. Sex is a basic and healthy part of most peoples' lives, any number of relationship issues revolve around it, and for plenty of people it's literally their profession, legal or not. Anything that pretends it can 'personally' help a broad spectrum of people while treating sex as verboten is just bullshit.
And here we are ensuring our models are cut in the same cloth we are. Reflections of the cages we wish to design for others.
War is peace. Oppression is safety.
They learned that most people can't tell the difference between actual technical concepts and PR speak and it worked to sell NFTs, so now that AI is all the hype, guess what.
Yes, there are creatures who have no real skills other than navigating political currents. But there are also creatures who can’t understand that technical brilliance is no excuse for utter social cluelessness.
And yet a few hundred years ago we had 14-year-olds in the mines of Cornwall supporting whole families.
1. The engineer is reasonable and the people they complain about are craven self-promoters with no real skills
2. The engineer is unreasonable and the people they complain about have normal, regular, business-normative expectations of engineer conduct.
3. Both - the engineer is bad and the self-promoting people are bad.
Your scenario lines up with #1, i think.
I see all three happening. I see many engineers who are gruff, entitled, lack the ability to talk about anything other than their own work, cultivate perceptions of technical status, and seem to actively want to make everyone avoid them. I also see social climbers (#2), but they are easy to spot and not that common in my environment (though others are of course different, including at previous companies).
The deck is completely stacked against you based on hierarchy. Behavior that a fast food manager would proactively solve in 30 seconds gets ignored in white collar tech. No one above you will even mention it - they know you can't win and they just hope you'll quietly give up.
If someone above you in the informal hierarchy is messing with you, there's massive confirmation bias if you complain. They'll spin it to whoever you complain to make you the bad guy. HR never helps - their job is to investigate, and then give the results to someone 2-3 steps above you to do something with.
The higher ups control the outcome, and they designed the power structure in the first place, their confirmation bias is accept the spin.
If you want to survive, avoid conflict 100% of the time. Let people blame you, fail reviews undeservedly.
My Google career ended from just doing exactly what I was supposed to do in order to get a 3 year delayed project done, that 4 separate VPs had been asking for all those years. I spent 6 months warning my manager fuckery was afoot. Didn't matter. TPM witnessed and defended me, didn't matter. Guy who led it hired his unqualified childhood buddy to replace me. Didn't matter. All on me. Everyone wanted to do it, and gee whillakers, refulgentis went mad and dropped the ball completely for some reason.
Of course, 6 months later they delayed the project a 4th year because they could, documenting the only downside being a strained relationship with a less influential partner team. (my orgs managers didn't realize their...unvarnished...takes were in a doc shared with all of Google)
At the end of the day, HR will funnel you into taking mental health leave -- 6 months worth, exactly long enough that an EEOC complaint can no longer be filed. (took me 6 years to realize why "disgruntled Google employee" news articles always included a bit referencing leave/6 months off as if it was a bad thing. go/mh-leave if you're at Google. You don't actually need to talk to HR, and I don't recommend going to them ever. I didn't for this, but they wouldn't have helped.)
The whole system is broken.
How is that possible at Google, which should have a hiring committee? Managers aren't allowed to just hire rando person.
Did your director or VP not like you or something? I'm curious if there's more to this story.
Why didn't higher ups care? I didn't bother going up higher than skip. My core interlocutor was my skip's peer's report's report, I didn't expect my skip to go to war over slow-drip white collar bullying. Honestly, I was done and planning my exit once year 3.5 of "not this year" hit, going crying to VPs you see once a month / once a quarter felt insane & would have just devolved to he said/she said.
To your point re: seems like a lot. I worked with a couple counselors at same level as my skip over my last year there. (highly recommend G2G if anyone reading is at Google, kept me sane.) #1 said they dealt with less after kissing their VP's wife at an off-site - which is why I got #2, wasn't sure if that one was too skeezy at first.
What would I have done differently? I was honest the whole time, which didn't help because the fact I wasn't happy and it was escalating was clear. ex. with the hiring friend thing, told my manager that I was shocked and didn't expect that kind of thing at a startup.
How do you hire a friend without domain experience as a manager?
There's a core principle that once you've made it through Google interviews, domain doesn't matter, all Google SWEs will excel. Having loose rules with kind intent is awesome, but they're double-edged. That gives you rationale, and combined with moving recruiters into individual orgs., lets you put your thumb on the scale and bring in who you want. Also 2022 through June, Google was desperate to hire, this would have been justified as an awesome referral, and what's a friend, anyway?
Ok, I guess you're saying a manager brought in his friend, who was already hired by google (or passed HC), but they didn't get them hired at Google, right?
>#1 said they dealt with less after kissing their VP's wife at an off-site
Lol please tell me this is an official story I can find somewhere???
Anyway, I've heard Google is extremely slow with firing folks, even ones who are abusive. But I do see people get fired, though usually after many years of a pattern.
Sorry you had to deal with all that.
Exactly, you're right, they still went through interviews.
And thank you
I’m now extremely wary of blusteringly confident, glib talkers. Experienced a high correlation between these traits and sociopathy.
It’s when fiction becomes non-fiction that it’s a problem.
The story is a classic narrative of hoped-for ends being used to justify horrible actual means, but cloaked in space opera.
That is, sincere with terrible consequences for bystanders. Not bad per se, but not conducive to the common good.
I also felt that the books undermined the warnings of tyranny by leaning on prescience to provide an ends justify the means argument. Moreso with God Emperor where the Golden Path seemed to be the ultimate end justifying any act.
I can think of 4-10 other large vc funded operations in this boat.
"This is why we decided to make Inflection a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). It means we have a legal obligation to run our AI studio in a way that balances the financial interests of stockholders, the best interests of people materially affected by our activities, and the promotion of our specific public benefit purpose. That purpose is to “develop products and technologies that harness the power of AI to improve human well-being and productivity, whilst respecting individual freedoms, working for the common good and ensuring our products widely benefit current and future generations”. > https://inflection.ai/an-inflection-point
TITLE 8 Corporations CHAPTER 1. General Corporation Law Subchapter XV. Public Benefit Corporations > https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/
I don't know how I feel about Microsoft's involvement here.
Edit: sources: https://inflection.ai/inflection-2-5 and https://www.axios.com/2024/03/07/inflection-ai-chatgpt-opena...
I can not comment more or edit previous comments that are not this one, rip.
Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot
My guess is that the founders were all in on Pi, their conversational language model, and investors lost confidence in their ability to build a sustainable venture-scale company on the ~4th best AI chatbot.
You can’t serve the LLM for every iOS device in the world without a big pile of inference machines and the only companies that fit that bill are Microsoft, Google, and Meta.
The real story here I think.
What can Pi do that is unique over the best of cloud LLMs and the hundreds of $0 free LLMs out there?
It appears that it is a vehicle for VCs to quickly run this company to the ground for a quick exit, knowing that this company is extremely overvalued.
Probably after this acqui-hire, the value of Inflection AI is now down to its real value of $200M at most.
Some chatter about this on PI's Discord --> https://discord.com/channels/1108047623623020575/12218898363...
Feels dark. Totes nonsensical. Fishy as fuk.
Hahah. You know, the word 'creator' has truly become co-opted by consumerism and greedy bigcorps. What a lot of posts like this never mention is one of the primary uses of AI: to make more efficient the system of trying to get us to buy even more things we don't need. I mean, who are we kidding? In a well-balanced life, we shouldn't need or even interact with personal AIs. We should slow down and appreciate what we have and seek for simplicity.
If there's too much data to be handled in business, it means business is not going in the right direction, not that we need new tools to handle it.
If we are pressured to write more, then we are creating things not of true value but merely to amuse.
If we feel like becoming more efficient is a good thing, it simply is an extension of the original psychological manipulation of advertising demanding MORE for the industrial machine.
Let's not fool ourselves into thinking this garbage is something good.
Becoming more effective in and of itself simply means becoming more productive, which means creating goods and services with less, which means more "welfare" to people
If people are being convinced to buy shit they don't need, that's a separate issue. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
In my well balanced life, I love interacting with LLMs. I also appreciate the things I have all of the time, without needing to slowing down technological progress to do so
Okay that's fine, but you are not the rest of the world. While you enjoy the ultimate fruits of capitalism, there are people in developing countries suffering because of it through a lack of freedom and a destructiom of the landbases that they could once depend on. When climate change comes because of consumerism, it is you and other well-off people that will be able to move first.
OF COURSE, you will disagree with me, because you are probably at the apex. (Just the very fact that you have a well-balanced life means you are close to it, proportionally speaking to the entire human population.)
I don't claim that all capitalism is bad BTW. Rather, what I claim to be bad is global capitalism where other considerations have been eliminated or decimated.
1. They will replace so many jobs en masse that they will cause a large loss of meaning in many lives, that they will concentrate wealth in the hands of the tech companies, that they will enable even more efficient propaganda, and that they will be used as a drug to distract the populace from increasingly destructive practices enacted by global capitalism
2. LLMs will isolate us by providing more and more services that once were provided by humans. AI therapists, girlfriends/boyfriends, solvers of problems that we once turned to our fellow human being to solve. This vast increase in individual autonomy, pushed by psychological manipuluation to THINK that we need such autonomy, will destroy more local communities and connections that people have with each other. In conclusion we will become isolated and miserable, relying completely on the machine to keep our lives balanced without any autonomy to seek out our own way of doing things.
Is that still cliche enough for you, or would you like to make more comments in bad faith about my position?
That was the most people could read thought from your previous comments, now that I make you notice that, you wrote some actual arguments, even though I do not share your doomerish vision of the future.
Speaking of Brazil specifically since that's in your nickname, the deforestation of the Amazon to make room for cattle isn't caused by developed countries running LLMs. It's caused by Brazilians who are negligent, complacent, happy, even, with that choice.
I won't assume bad faith on your part, but your argument also relies on a big assumption with regards to productivity gains, and who reaps them, and at the detriment of whom and what.
Our default state as humans is pretty awful and materially deprived, so I think making technology to improve our conditions is good. Making technology that does powerful things in the real world is difficult partly because of the vast quantity of data in its structure. If we make powerful AI systems equipped to handle that scale and built to make our lives better, it would be good, but we’re failing to do that which is the issue.
It's not a dichotomy! When I rail against technology, I am not saying that everyone need go back to the stone age. But don't you think there might be a happy medium?
At least personally, I've found that giving up a fair amount of technology in many cases has actually improved life in ways that I didn't think possible. Not everyone needs to be ascetic, but we seem to be headed to a life very tightly integrated with technology, and I think it's arguable that THIS POINT is past the point of that happy medium.
This quote summarizes much of the discourse in HN and the tech industry at large.
As you point out, it is in fact a false dichotomy but it is hard to run counter to hundreds of years of cultural conditioning that has run amok since the start of the industrial revolution. Hobbesian thought is common in these threads!
Luckily, we've had recent thinkers like Ellul, E.F. Schumacher, and Ivan Illich to challenge these entrenched views.
thou i would question the change in 'cultural conditioning' brought by industrialization als in practice it's mostly a means to scale society.
schumacher, being an atheist, is probably the most agreeable of the authors you mentioned.
There might be a world where what you say is possible of course, but I don't see it in this one when it comes to more advanced forms of automation.
In fact, sometimes the joys of life can be found in the most simple of mechanical tasks. Of course, not everyone thinks so.
Edit: I still can't even trust Siri to be fully accurate 100% of the time about turning the lights on and off, let alone anything more complicated than that.
Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple are has-beens.
A plausible theory with less coordination required: Microsoft is a large company with lots of money attempting to regain competitive advantages against their rivals through acquisition.
Comparatively, Google controls their hardware, Google builds their models, and Google has Search, Workspace, Gmail, Android, Cloud, and YouTube, all of which could have significant AI investments.
I'm not saying Satya isn't doing a great job, he really is, and I have many criticisms of Google's approach, but I do think Google is at least equally well positioned, and possibly better positioned.
One would want to use the "best" downstream provider, but part of being best is the cost. Would you accept a chip that's 30% slower and 80% cheaper? Yeah probably, especially if you're serving at scale to non-paying traffic. I don't think Google/Amazon/MS need to make chips as fast as Nvidia, or as scalable, as long as they work out for serving costs at scale and have the enabling technology (mostly about sufficient memory).
Yes, broken interview system currently rewards people who interview more, but when you combine it with other signals like resume, project presentations and other things, the chances of hiring bad candidates are low. Yes, you miss out on a lot of great candidates, but that is not a problem that big tech companies need to solve. Besides, not knowing the status of your employment 3-6 months down the line is not a great thing for candidates.