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Sean White talks about Inflection AI\u2019s post-Microsoft reset and his vision for A.I. to become more relational and prosocial. Courtesy Inflection AI<\/p>\n\t\t\t\tSean White talks about Inflection AI\u2019s post-Microsoft reset and his vision for A.I. to become more relational and prosocial. Courtesy Inflection AI<\/p>\n
In 2022, early in the first wave of generative A.I., DeepMind<\/a> co-founder Mustafa Suleyman<\/a> and LinkedIn<\/a> co-founder turned venture capitalist Reid Hoffman<\/a> launched Inflection AI<\/a>, billing it as an attempt to build an emotionally intelligent A.I. The company\u2019s core product was a chatbot called Pi, \u201cpurely designed for relaxed, supportive, informative conversation,<\/a>\u201d Suleyman said at the time. The startup quickly attracted backing from Microsoft<\/a>, Nvidia<\/a>, Bill Gates<\/a> and Eric Schmidt<\/a> and reached a $4 billion valuation<\/a> when it was barely a year old.<\/p>\n Less than a year later, in March 2024, however, its core team dissolved. Microsoft hired Suleyman and much of Inflection\u2019s founding team in one of the A.I. industry\u2019s first major acqui-hires<\/a>. Microsoft paid the startup about $650 million, largely to compensate its investors<\/a>, according to Reuters. The only person who didn\u2019t leave was Hoffman, who remains on Inflection\u2019s board. He tapped Sean White<\/a>, a computer scientist who formerly led R&D at Mozilla<\/a>, as the startup\u2019s new CEO.<\/p>\n Taking over a once-high-flying A.I. startup after most of its founding team has left can sound a little like rebuilding a house from the dust of its demolition. Inflection hasn\u2019t raised new funding and now operates with a staff of roughly 60. After the upheaval, the company shifted much of its focus to enterprise customers. But its original consumer product, Pi, has also continued to evolve quietly.<\/p>\n Last month, Inflection signaled a renewed push into consumer A.I. with the launch of Inflection AI Labs and its first experiment, \u201cPi Journeys,\u201d a chatbot designed to help users navigate different stages of life, from starting a new career to caring for aging parents.<\/p>\n White spoke with Observer about rebuilding Inflection after its dramatic reset, his vision for what he calls \u201crelational A.I.\u201d and how A.I. could one day be truly embedded in our personal and emotional lives rather than displacing human connection.<\/p>\n The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n Observer: You took over Inflection at an unusually turbulent moment, just after Mustafa Suleyman and much of the founding team left for Microsoft. How did Reid Hoffman approach you about the role, and what made you think there was still something worth building?<\/p>\n Sean White: Mustafa left cleanly. Most of the conversation was with Reid. I have an incredible amount of respect for Reid, his thoughtfulness and his view of the long arc and horizon in history.<\/p>\n It was pretty clear that we could take something that was nascent\u2014where everybody was focusing on IQ\u2014and lean into what it meant for systems to have emotional intelligence. To be clear, I\u2019m not talking about a virtual boyfriend or girlfriend. That\u2019s less interesting to me than systems that are actually great interfaces because they understand you and can help you achieve what you want. It\u2019s less about replacing people and more about giving people agency.<\/p>\n Hoffman stayed on the board after the transition. What does your working relationship with him look like now? What do you guys talk about when you meet?<\/p>\n It ranges. We actually met just last night. Sometimes the discussions are about what\u2019s happening globally with A.I. and the things I\u2019m seeing. As you know, all of this moves so fast. We want to have as many radars up as we can.<\/p>\n Sometimes we\u2019re down in the weeds. I was showing him a prototype of something playful that we had been building on our own systems. We also talk about what\u2019s happening with the company and the team, some of the long-haul items and what it means when you combine relational A.I. with existing forms of A.I.<\/p>\n Pi originally stood out because Inflection was emphasizing personal intelligence and emotional intelligence at a time when most of the industry was focused on raw model capability. How much of that original thesis still defines the company today?<\/p>\n If you\u2019re really thinking about designing toward human-centered A.I., you step back and ask: What does it mean to be human? What\u2019s important? None of us exists in isolation, and we shouldn\u2019t exist in isolation.<\/p>\n If you look at the architectures and systems from two years ago, they weren\u2019t built with the same harnesses or pipelines for fine-tuning and actually improving EQ in the ways we now know we can. They also didn\u2019t have any of the real agentic capabilities that I believe are the next step in helping people.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been building out those systems. Almost every one of these systems has been built from the ground up for A.I.-to-person interaction. What we\u2019ve been experimenting with is taking into account the fact that you have other people around you. It uses relational A.I. to understand what those relationships are and to be prosocial.<\/p>\n Most A.I. tools on the market today focus on automating tasks and helping us work faster. You seem interested in something different. What do you think the industry is missing or getting wrong?<\/p>\n So much of what we see is focused on pure productivity. When I have conversations, particularly with my friends in the humanities, they remind me that life isn\u2019t purely about productivity.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll see some experiments from us that explore that idea. That doesn\u2019t mean we won\u2019t also build things that help people in their everyday lives. With Pi Journeys, you\u2019ll see things like life navigation, parenting and caregiving support, personal growth and help with simple daily tasks, from finding recipes to organizing your thoughts.<\/p>\n These ideas don\u2019t come out of nowhere. We have a team doing really interesting user research, including a study of people who currently use A.I. One thing that surprised me was that, on average, people use more than three A.I. systems over the course of a week. It\u2019s not just one system.<\/p>\n For us, that creates an opportunity to focus on what people are actually doing in their daily lives. If you\u2019re organizing your life and need to stay in touch with siblings, coordinate with other people or care for an older adult or a child, these are ways A.I. can help you be more prosocial while also managing to-dos, organization and other practical tasks.<\/p>\n Inflection AI Labs launched as a place to test some of those ideas publicly, and Pi Journeys is your first experiment. What\u2019s the long-term goal of these experiments?<\/p>\n Of course, we still run lots of experiments internally. But I think one of the best ways to build products is to learn quickly with people outside of our bubble. Pi Journeys is one of our first experiments. It helps you understand the people who are important in your life. That can be for different use cases, whether you\u2019re a caregiver, organizing a household or just living your life.<\/p>\n The arc is: You start with IQ, then you have EQ. If it\u2019s just IQ, it\u2019s just search. Then you go from IQ and EQ to AQ, or the agentic ability to do things, and finally to real social intelligence.<\/p>\n You\u2019re building A.I. around the routines of everyday life. How do you use A.I. in work and life?\u00a0<\/p>\n I use multiple A.I. systems for everything from organizing my email to discussing and working things out on my drive in to aggregating new information.<\/p>\n As I\u2019m coming in, I use Pi because I like the dialogue and voice aspects of it. If I\u2019m trying to get something straight in my head, learn something new or make sure I remember a couple of things on my drive into work, I use Pi.<\/p>\n If I\u2019m doing something more business-oriented, like slides or spreadsheets, I use Claude for a lot of that, as well as some experimental systems.<\/p>\n I also use some of our own systems to aggregate different headlines, news stories and other information, work across them and see what they show.<\/p>\n On my way back home, I tend to use Pi again. I also use it in some cases for searching. For instance, recently\u2014and this is super mundane\u2014I needed a new belt and was asking Pi for help with it.<\/p>\n The A.I. landscape is moving so fast. When you think about where the industry is now, what feels genuinely important, and where you think it\u2019s headed?<\/p>\n I tend to have a \u201clong now\u201d visualization of this, which is that we\u2019re just at the beginning. I show my team a graph I built that shows search engine market share starting in 1994, which is roughly when I entered the workforce, through today. What\u2019s amazing is how much it changes.<\/p>\n In 1994, my office mate was Srinija Srinivasan, who later became Yahoo\u2019s first \u201cchief ontologist.\u201d<\/a> It was just a couple of students sitting next to each other in these terrible offices. Everybody thought Yahoo<\/a> was going to win. Then, somewhere around 1997 or 1998, everybody thought Lycos and Excite were going to win. A few years later, Google<\/a> started powering through.<\/p>\n What it reminds me is that we are in such early days, such early stages of A.I. I\u2019d really like to make sure that the things we\u2019re building are actually helping people and that we\u2019re focused on the uses, the systems and how those evolve. That\u2019s where I feel like I, our team and our organization can have an impact.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sean White talks about Inflection AI\u2019s post-Microsoft reset and his vision for A.I. to become more relational and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,1079,309,21192,5044,25243,132,20482,6561,7425,11708,320,11528,4138,58,20483,71422,134,7094],"class_list":["post-145101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-bill-gates","tag-business","tag-business-interviews","tag-deepmind","tag-eric-schmidt","tag-google","tag-inflection-ai","tag-interviews","tag-linkedin","tag-mergers-and-acquisitions","tag-microsoft","tag-mozilla","tag-mustafa-suleyman","tag-nvidia","tag-reid-hoffman","tag-sean-white","tag-technology","tag-yahoo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}