What is Inflection A.I.?
Michael Spencer
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
What is Inflection AI Reid Hoffman's Second Company after LinkedIn?
LinkedIn and DeepMind co-founders form AI startup to help humans talk to computers
Silicon Valley has been pretty influential in how the algorithmic web we know today was born. But will it also be crucial in how A.I. businesses evolve in the future of technology?
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Some believe that?A.I. is at an inflection point?in history where a technological singularity becomes possible for artificial general intelligence. Others believe we’ll be using A.I. to augment our own human intelligence.
Reid Hoffman has co-founded his first new company since LinkedIn sale
Reid Hoffman is well respected in Silicon Valley. It is the first time Hoffman has co-founded a company since he sold LinkedIn to Microsoft for $26.2 billion in 2016. Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. His net worth is believed to be around $2.1 Billion. That’s about one third of Jack Dorsey.
What is Inflection?
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Inflection will aim to develop AI software products that make it easier for humans to communicate with computers. In a decade where both NLP and brain computer interfaces (BCI) are trending, this seems to be good timing for such an AI startup.
Inflection AI also has a DeepMind vet as its chief scientist. So this is one of those Silicon Valley stories where some of the better-known minds in tech are uniting to tackle one of computing's greater challenges, according to Engadget.
Solving Business Problems with AI.
You can visit the Inflection website here.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman have formed?Inflection AI?in 2022, a company that will use artificial intelligence software to help humans talk to computers. The hope, according to Suleyman, is that you'll speak to computers in ordinary language — this will "almost certainly" be possible in five years, he said.
Developing the Smart Voice-Computer Operating System
You may remember the?movie HER, where a lonely man strikes up a relationship with his smart OS. It’s been nearly 10 years since this movie (hard to believe) but it has inspired countless companies to be born.
That movie haunted many of us who knew technology was isolating us systemically and also would solve the problem themselves for commercial profit.
One wonders if the Metaverse will be a place we interact more with A.I. than each other? Inflexion.AI’s motto however is more B2B:
Solving business problems with AI
We implement?leading?artificial intelligence that?generates a return on investment for organisations?today. Not tomorrow.
Such a company is in 2022 possible since we’ve made incredible breakthrough in NLP and live now in a world where voice search is becoming more popular among young people. People are ready for a stage of ambient computing where the world is more responsive to us as in the hype of the Internet of Things. Artificial intelligence is ready to augment the IoT of everything.
Reid Hoffman is also able to build something that Microsoft can acquire again, and he knows the hoops to jump through in order to do just that.
This is Reid Hoffman in 2015. Like Silicon Valley Reid Hoffman hasn’t aged that well, but it has spawned powerful tycoons that can keep creating valuable businesses platforms as the PayPal Mafia or the Uber Mafia in China can attest to.
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While Reid is a Co-founder, Inflection will be led by Suleyman, who will take on the role of CEO. It was?earlier reported that he quit Google?apparently to become a VC. In August 2019, Mustafa Suleyman announced he was stepping away from DeepMind, adding that he needed “break to recharge.” So it’s not exactly surprising that he’s founding another company now.
Suleyman’s exit from Google, which acquired DeepMind in 2014, comes after he was accused of having aggressive management style by former colleagues at DeepMind. Reid Hoffman it seems is not a victim of Suleyman’s aggression. Or was it bullying and humiliation of co-workers. The thing is A.I. doesn’t actually care about your past #MeToo or corporate management follies or behavior.
Suleyman’s team back in the day at DeepMind was supposed to find ways of making the DeepMind technology profitable by, for example, cutting Google’s data center cooling costs. A self-proclaimed social activist, he was once quoted as saying he believes “capitalism is failing society”. Silicon Valley and those idealists eh!
Regardless of who these people are and how well connected they are as co-founders, the entrepreneurs have known each other for almost 10 years.
Suleyman will serve as CEO, while fellow DeepMind alumni Karén Simonyan will operate as Inflection's chief scientist. The company aims to stay relatively small to preserve the team's focus and speed. As more A.I. centric companies are born, we’ll keep finding new use cases in the real world for artificial intelligence. Several companies including?Facebook’s secretive unit Building 8?have failed to help people be able to talk with computers.
However society and humanity are just a few years away from a Universal language translator that is flawless in real-world interactions in real-time. Voice speakers like Google home and Alexa have proved useful, if somewhat limited in their ability to tailor how humans can control the smart home, and get information via speaking.
Before joining Google, Suleyman co-founded DeepMind in London with childhood friend Demis Hassabis and New Zealander Shane Legg in 2010. DeepMind in 2022 is finally profitable, though mostly from commercial interactions with its parent company of Alphabet. DeepMind has however managed to attract some of the finest minds in artificial intelligence research and have grown their capabilities for applied research.
What is Inflection’s Mission Statement Exactly?
From what we know so far, Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Inflection will aim to develop AI software products that make it easier for humans to communicate with computers.
“If you think about the history of computing, we have always been trying to reduce the complexity of our ideas in order to communicate them to a machine,” Suleyman said in his first interview with CNBC about the new project.
The co-founders have hinted this company could be?implicated in voice-search, in particular from a consumer standpoint.
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“Even when we write a search query, we’re simplifying, we’re reducing or we’re writing in shorthand so that the search engine can understand what we want.”
I think eventually that relates to a more AI-human companionable OS, or operating system. All of this remains low-hanging fruit and a bit of a holy grail in human-machine interaction and learning. With new advances in NLP and universal language translation possible very soon in real-time, getting computers into the loop is a logical next step.
DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman -?Greylock Partners.
With the Fed stimulus there’s so much liquidity hanging around for VC to throw on long-bets. Inflection A.I. feels like one of those long-bets in artificial intelligence and its impact to change the future of computing leading to more ambient computing possibilities.
I would bet Reid and Mustafa do indeed share many ideas about the future of A.I’s place in society. Think about it, this move was likely a long time in coming. Hoffman and Suleyman have known each other for nearly a decade, and Suleyman backed away from DeepMind in August 2019 following both a desire to "recharge" and criticisms of his management style in previous years. Moreover, they have complementary abilities and experience.
As we have seen with companies?like C3.AI, you can scale an AI startup to absurd highs from a consumer or a B2B angle. Even if you don’t exactly know the product-market fit, A.I. will scale with voice computing and will scale with its ability to augment humans in work and in other ways. This is a huge playing field for technologists, venture capitalists and the evolution of natural language processing as a whole.
Just like the?inflection point of A.I. into the future is a bit uncertain, this startup needs time to mature. There are still many unknowns surrounding Inflection. It hasn't pinpointed its target audience or a timeline for its first products. Andrew Ng another popular A.I. personality, also made his own A.I. company called Landing A.I.
Andrew’s company is more about Computer vision and is more of a B2B play. Founded in Palo Alto in 2017, Landing AI has developed a computer vision tool that manufacturers can use to create their own visual inspection software. It’s super interesting to see A.I. luminaries founding new companies. Reid Hoffman hasn’t exactly been inactive since his LinkedIn win, and has a great knowledge of the Silicon Valley back alleys of VC’s power structure. He understands the game.
Hints from the Suleyman
When humans want to control a computer, they need to learn a programming language in order to provide instructions, he added, or use a mouse to navigate and engage with things on the screen. “All of these are ways we simplify our ideas and reduce their complexity and in some ways their creativity and their uniqueness in order to get a machine to do something,” Suleyman said.
The British entrepreneur claimed a new suite of technologies that Inflection will aim to develop will eventually enable anyone to speak to a computer in plain language.
It’s unclear at this stage who Inflection will sell its products to, at what price, and when.
Could Inflection A.I. Acquire BCI Startups?
This is what leads me to believe Inflection A.I. could also be implicated in working on the human user interface with computers, and may be related to brain-computer-interface (BCIs) in the future.
If computers understood language better, perhaps we wouldn’t need to tap phones or use keyboards quite as often or in quite the same way. How do you reduce complexity in how we relate to what A.I. will become, not only what machine intelligence is today? This is why I write on things like the quantum computing BCIs of the future.
I started a Newsletter called Quantum Foundry so I could track quantum computing startups better and understand how they scale with machine intelligence and machine learning.
I’m pretty interested as a whole in the intersection between venture capital, startups and pure-play companies on artificial intelligence. I think?Inflection A.I.?has a pretty good chance of turning into something quite interesting.
As technological loneliness scales through civilization, there will also be more silos and mental health events, such that happen when we are predominantly working in remote environments, even doing our exercise at home and living alone more. Creating products and software that allows A.I. to fulfil some of the counseling, therapy and mental health facilitation required could be big business. The movie HER was haunting also because our hero was suffering. The A.I. OS was part of the solution.
Use Case: The AI Buddy or Companion
Think of that first initial moment when Joaquin Phoenix’s character meets his AI buddy in the film HER (2013). It certainly feels like an inflection point for his future mental health and well-being.
In some ways we have to admit that Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home have basically failed in impacting us in a meaningful way (Siri and Cortana feel like history). You could easily argue that existing AI assistants?aren't particularly clever, and fixing that could improve everything from the phone in your pocket to next-generation robots. There are many avenues Inflection A.I. could go, and scale very well.
When you are a Billionaire like Reid Hoffman, you have access to a Billionaire network. Even better, when you have experience in Venture Capital. You can make big bets that can attract top talent in artificial intelligence to your startup.
What is the Future of Voice-AI?
While voice A.I. has suffered from considerable hype, NLP and the Metaverse give it new possibilities that will be possible in five years that have never been possible before to impact humans at the intersection of machine learning.
Even the likes of Microsoft Research have their own?dedicated NLP group.?Eventually they can acquire companies like Inflection A.I. (if they develop something useful) to promote new kinds of products.
Human-machine interaction has advanced significantly over the last decade and many people now speak to AI-powered virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa on a daily basis. But Apple or Amazon don’t have stellar relationships in A.I. in their secretive culture. A.I. research needs to be open and useful to the world at large. Even huge AI firms like DeepMind and OpenAI unlikely have anything up their sleeve that will impact ambient computing in a big way.
Corporate entities with a razor focus can push innovation forward at a time where other avenues are blocked. So this is again part of the potential use case for a company like?Inflection A.I.
Towards a Human-AI Symbiosis Singularity
I think we need talking machines before we talk to machines. But the future of artificial intelligence is getting ready to unfold in how we augment ourselves with A.I. While the conversations are still far from fluid, computer scientists believe it’s only a matter of time before the experience becomes more seamless as?machines get better at generating their own language.
There could be a case where when computers start making up their own language or interacting with us better it will be a AI-human singularity inflection point.
“It feels like we’re on the cusp of being able to generate language to pretty much human-level performance,” Suleyman said, adding that he believes it will almost certainly be possible within five years. “It opens up a whole new suite of things that we can do in the product space.”
Such a Human-AI Inflection point might be achieved with a BCI, it might not. It might be enabled with quantum computing, it might not. It might be different than we imagine today in 2022. And that ultimately is what’s so exciting about startups like?Inflection.
I’d say there’s a roughly 60% chance that by 2028 we have a major “ah-ha” moment as human beings in our Human-AI symbiosis to augment our capabilities both professionally and in terms of mental health facilitated by and in relation to AI.
Reid Hoffman is a living legend of Silicon Valley in some circles, so that he’s finally starting something new is noteworthy in 2022. He’s in the top 1500 richest people on the planet and was the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn that was founded twenty years ago in 2002.
Inflection AI wants to make it easier for humans to talk to computers. Okay good luck, we'll be watching.
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