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!"
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?
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.
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)
I have some serious issues with this company's PR.
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.
"After just 3 days of being incorporated and just 2 days of actual work performed, we have now created the best AI on the planet with trillions of active subscribers, per second.
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.
Dunno, it's pretty damn good and quite useful. I asked Mistral 7b and Claude Opus to count the banned substances on the WADA anti doping list. Both avoided a straight response giving back loads of bs. Claude was next to useless. Mistral gave a somewhat acceptable answer counting substances on every chapter after much persuasion. Inflection's pi AI gave me a straight answer to the first question without any bs. I like its casual tone and the fact that it does not use needlessly superfluous language like the GPT models.
Also, and I'm going to put this real bluntly, a "personal AI" isn't worth crap to a lot of people until it's allowed to talk about sex.
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.
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.
They had raised massive amount and not from good patient investors. No traction means Mustafa got fired. This is not surprising though but what is surprising is MSFT picked him up. The guy is not technical, is not even visionary and had just got lucky hanging out with Demis. I would think Satya had better taste.
He also left DeepMind because of allegations of bullying employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Suleyman). Between that, what you just brought up, and the strange PR blitz he went on to promote his book, I kind of predicted Inflection would run into major trouble well before OpenAI and Anthropic
There’s a whole extremely famous book series on this very topic, you might have heard about it. The first volume’s title is ‘Paul is bad’ but it’s more widely known as ‘Dune’.
That would apply probably to most famous entrepreneurs. Whatever I have read about Jobs, Musk, Gates and others, they all are very willing to abuse people to achieve their goals.
It's crazy there's zero accountability for bad behavior in tech. I went through my own story at Google, and seeing them say it was vaguely bad before promoting him to VP mirrors exactly the "intervention" I saw.
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 interesting emphasis to me is commercial customers. They are acknowledging that the competition to be the nth gpt vendor is too stiff for them, and they aren’t successful as an independent venture funded research lab.
I can think of 4-10 other large vc funded operations in this boat.
Between this and the Mistral deal (that’s currently under investigation by the EU), Microsoft looks to be really trying to get back into the monopoly business with AI.
I don't know about Inflection, but their new CEO is a great leader who I've worked with in the past. Just having him on board raises their status significantly in my mind.
How is Inflections "Public Benefit Corporation" and "legal status" play here, and how are the lawyers dancing around that entity type (delaware registration, looks as if).
"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
Readit News
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?
Could probably do it now with a browser plugin and the right llm prompt. Perhaps call it the un-BSifier.
* 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.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
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.
[0] https://inflection.ai/inflection-2-5
[1] https://inflection.ai/inflection-2
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.
I’m now extremely wary of blusteringly confident, glib talkers. Experienced a high correlation between these traits and sociopathy.
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.
Deleted Comment
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/