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Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

So sounds like the real news is that Microsoft basically acquihired the Inflection founding team?

I hope one day we can drop the corporate facade so these blog posts can be two to three sentences of "Our company sucked. Microsoft wanted to give me a fuck ton of money. I decided to take it. Some other guy is in charge now. Good luck!"

A lot of people don’t know this but all these VC valuations are fake, they had this planned years ago to fake growth.

Maybe someone try training an LLM to do just that.

Does getting acquhired by MS imply your company sucked?

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?

It means your people are good and your product isn’t. That requires a kind of cognitive dissonance that some people would call “suckage”. Certainly had that conversation many, many times.

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.

Eh I think some startup culture injected into Microsoft is a good thing, whatever that might mean. Have to shake things up

> startup culture injected into Microsoft is a good thing

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.

It’s a bit different when you’re replacing or creating the head of a division since they’ll replace their own lieutenants and onwards down

didn't really get acquihired, which would be if MSFT bought inflection, instead it seems MSFT hired away a team, probably with options and whatnot.

Ironically, AI will probably help to provide this.

Could probably do it now with a browser plugin and the right llm prompt. Perhaps call it the un-BSifier.

The prompt "summarise this in 2-3 sentences in the least charitable way possible" returned the following on chat.mistral.ai

>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.

You could set this up as a service on unbullshitthis.com

Hear, hear! There is a market for a no-bs-happenings.com.

I think we can assume almost all acquisitions are "this cash is better than continuing to operate as we were.... make of that what you will".

I asked ChatGPT to summarize, this is what it came up with:

* 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.

They aquihired 3 people who didn’t do any technical work. Nadella miscalculated big time here.

Not if it kneecaps a key competitor.

That's right, they could be doing no work at Google !

Fortune reported that Microsoft hired most employees from Inflection.

Right, Karen Simonyan is not technical at all...

is it really a win on MSFT part though?

Absolutely.

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.

Pi is nice to talk to because unlike other chatbots, it always, always, always asks a follow-up question. I'd love to see the system prompt. That's what's driving their claim of high engagement—the bot just keeps drilling you with questions, and for some people, the bait is irresistible.

Not only follow up questions, but it also gives straight answers without bs, lecturing the user, claiming the model is somehow limited or flat out refusals which are Gemini's specialty.

It is not.

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.

I am not sure why you are being down voted. Track record matters.

AI safety and ethics are a big deal. Nobody wants to buy a big heap of linear algebra. A big heap of linear algebra that is so close to becoming sentient that we have to plan what its ethics should be? Where do I put my money?!?

If you ask engineers to sell linear algebra, they invent things like control systems, which are too tricky to sell.

"AI safety and ethics are a big deal" - yes. But no bigger deal and, arguably, a smaller deal compared to software safety and ethics.

> (except all the garbage ethics, safety crap that didn't help google, probably kneecapped it actually)

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.

"AI ethics" from a person booted based on allegations of coworker bullying?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com