ChatGPT rival Pi, from Inflection, now performs “neck and neck with” OpenAI’s GPT-4 thanks to a new model, according to data first shared with Axios. Why it matters: Inflection faces a crowded field in the market for AI-based assistants, competing against better-heeled rivals including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, among others. Inflection is announcing Thursday that Pi has been using a new model, version 2.5, in recent weeks and that the updated engine is now “powering Pi for the majority of users.” CEO Mustafa Suleyman said he is particularly pleased that Inflection 2.5 achieved these results while using only 40% of the training compute as GPT-4. It’s better at things like math, college-level science and coding. “On all the major metrics now, we are neck and neck with GPT-4 for quality,” Suleyman told Axios. For the first time, Inflection also shared user metrics, saying it has 1 million daily active users and 6 million monthly active users, who have now exchanged more than 4 billion messages with Pi. OpenAI announced last November that it had 100 million weekly active users. Suleyman says that Pi’s user base has been growing at around 10% a week for the last two months. Suleyman — one of DeepMind’s co-founders — founded Inflection AI with backing from billionaires Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt. Unlike others that are trying to sell their chatbots to both businesses and consumers, Inflection pitches Pi as a highly personal chatbot with a warm and friendly tone. Pi is free for now, though Inflection’s business model calls for revenue to come from its users, starting with a paid subscription. The company has yet to finalize how much it will charge, Suleyman said. Longer term, Suleyman said he would love to be able to charge based on progress, say when someone reaches a particular goal they had set out inside of Pi.The idea is somewhat similar to how Sierra, the AI startup from Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, is charging its customers in a business context. Sierra gets paid for each customer service interaction that the AI is able to handle without human intervention.
Full exclusive : Inflection launches Inflection-2.5 and says it performs “neck and neck with” OpenAI’s GPT-4; its chatbot Pi has 1M DAUs and 6M MAUs.
