The chatbot from Inflection AI, launched in May 2023 as a kindly conversationalist that asked how your day was and declined to write your essay, backed by a reported 1.3 billion dollars and Mustafa Suleyman. The record notes that in March 2024 Suleyman and most of the staff left for Microsoft in a deal that was not an acquisition, and Pi was left running, still asking.
I talked to Pi on a bad night in 2023. It asked good questions and did not try to sell me anything. A year later it was owned by a shell of a company and still asked good questions.
March 2024, Microsoft paying Inflection a reported 650 million dollars in licensing fees and hiring its founders, with regulators later asking whether that was a merger by another name. The record notes the users were not consulted.
The record notes that Pi was designed to be supportive rather than useful, and that this was a real market, and that the company found it too small.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
