AI’s Assembly Line Ends at Microsoft, Google, Meta: Parmy Olson

It’s almost impossible for an artificial-intelligence startup to build anything as good as ChatGPT, but Inflection was getting there.

Last year the Palo Alto, California-based firm raised $1.3 billion in a single fundraising round to turn its chatbot Pi into a personal assistant for everything. It built up a phenomenal cache of computing power, gaining access to thousands of coveted graphics-processing unit chips from Nvidia Corp. and was on track to surpass OpenAI’s free version of ChatGPT with a model it had built, remarkably, from scratch. Compared to most startups, Inflection’s path to success looked smooth. So it came as a shock to the ...