SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft has agreed to pay Inflection AI US$650 million (S$873 million), largely to license its artificial intelligence (AI) software, alongside its move earlier this week to hire most of the start-up’s staff, according to a person familiar with the transaction.
Microsoft stunned the AI world on March 19 with an announcement that it had hired Inflection’s co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan, along with most of the start-up’s 70 employees.
The unusual deal, first reported by Bloomberg News, resembled an “acqui-hire” – but without an acquisition.
Some legal and industry experts have suggested that Microsoft’s Inflection deal might still spark antitrust concerns with US regulators, who are increasingly scrutinising Big Tech’s AI investments and partnerships.
Now, with a much smaller staff, Inflection is trying to offload some of its compute capacity, or access to computing power that can be used for tasks like training AI models, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company is seeking a partial refund from its cloud computing partner CoreWeave, one of the people said. The step could reduce costs related to building AI models as Inflection shifts to an enterprise rather than consumer business model.
As part of the deal, Microsoft will pay US$620 million to license Inflection’s AI models and around US$30 million for waiving any legal rights related to the mass hiring, according to one person.
Microsoft and CoreWeave did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Inflection AI declined to comment.
The deal will make Inflection’s investors whole, as Bloomberg previously reported, with a modest return on investment.
However, those investors are not immediately expected to reap big rewards on what once appeared to be an AI rocket ship, valued at US$4 billion after raising US$1.3 billion in 2023.
As investor interest in chatbots surged last year, Inflection debuted a bot named Pi – positioned as a kind of personal assistant that was nicer and more reliable than competitors.
But Mr Suleyman told Bloomberg this week that Inflection had not succeeded in finding an effective business model.
As the start-up plots a new course, Mr Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist and a Microsoft board member, will stay on at Inflection as a director and co-founder.
The new chief executive officer will be Mr Sean White, who previously served as the chief research and development officer at Mozilla.
Inflection will also retain its proprietary technology. In a blog post on March 19, it said it was well-positioned to serve companies including Microsoft.
“Our success at training, tailoring and improving the performance of large AI models makes us uniquely well-placed to be the AI platform for businesses around the world,” it said. BLOOMBERG
