In a surprise move this week, Microsoft announced that Mustafa Suleyman would be joining them from Inflection AI, and to all intents and purposes the lab would be coming under the wing of the tech giant, with a licencing and staff transfer deal. Suleyman will lead the consumer focused AI arm at Microsoft across Copilot, Edge and Bing. Inflection posted that they would be shifting focus to enterprise use cases. Pi their ultra-friendly assistant had recently seen a model enhancement to near GPT-4 levels at a 40% smaller size. But with no brand awareness, distribution, API, or paid consumer subscription option, and tough competition from ChatGPT and Claude, it seems Inflection were not up for the fight. Perhaps for Microsoft, Suleyman is seen as the creative force that can stitch together the consumer space more coherently. In other lab news Stability AI saw the departure of further key technical staff. Despite having substantial GPU compute and having made some progress with its Stable Diffusion and LM text models, again not being closely aligned to a big tech firm is proving problematic.
Takeaways: In the current landscape, the big tech firms are the ultra-dominant forces (and perhaps now Saudi Arabia with their new $40bn AI fund). AI labs need vast pockets, market access, and AI GPU ‘factories’ given the huge costs in researching, training and continuously deploying competitive models. Plus consumer AI is still a challenge, with limited user maturity and willingness to pay for Internet tools. But as the compute abundance equation changes, and open-weight models grow in power and diversity, this concentration of power will lessen. Meta will release their Llama 3 open-weight model to the world in July and this will be exactly the disruptive event Meta are wanting to achieve (from their war chest of some 600,000 GPUs).