Inflection told TechCrunch it plans to limit free access to its AI chatbot Pi in the coming months, as the new CEO shifts the company's focus to enterprise products. Users can now also export conversations from the AI chatbot.
The usage caps come just a year after Inflexion raised $1.3 billion to develop an “emotionally intelligent” AI chatbot. Microsoft, one of the lead investors in that deal, hired most of the company's founders and staff five months ago and paid $650 million to license its AI models and repay investors. At the time, Inflexion said Pi was reaching millions of weekly users.
The deal has attracted the attention of U.S. and U.K. antitrust regulators, who are now investigating whether Microsoft was anticompetitive when it effectively acquired Inflexion. Since then, CEO Shaun White has been guiding the distressed startup through a difficult post-acquisition hiring phase.
Two weeks ago, an Inflection spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company was planning to phase out the Pi, which is understandable given that Inflection is more resource-constrained than it used to be.
“We have to apply our resources very carefully,” White told TechCrunch.
But plans have since changed, and White now says the company is committed to keeping the consumer Pi alive. But Inflection is looking to ease the strain on GPU resources by capping usage of free chatbots, which Inflection says will primarily affect power users. As for details on the cap, a spokesperson told TechCrunch that “the exact limits are still being determined.”
If that's not convincing, Inflection also offers the opportunity to move important conversations with Pi out of the chatbot: Inflection has partnered with the Data Transfers Initiative to allow users to export conversations from Pi and, theoretically, import conversations from other chatbots.
White believes Inflection has set a new standard in data mobility and transferability for the AI industry, and he hopes other companies will follow suit. However, because Inflection is the first to do so, you can't actually import conversations with Pi into ChatGPT or any other chatbot, only get conversations out of Pi.
A future direction for Inflection could be to license its AI models for companies to incorporate into their own systems, and White said 13,000 organizations have filled out applications expressing interest in API access to Pi.
“To be honest with you, we don't have the resources to handle 13,000 requests, so we've had to be very selective about who we work with,” White said.
White added that the company has had meetings with major banks, insurance companies and several Fortune 500 companies about the potential use of its enterprise products. White argues that Inflection's fine-tuning infrastructure allows it to customize AI models for specific organizations in a way that's better than competitors. He hopes to announce its first enterprise products and partnerships in the fall.