Inflection will cap free access to its AI chatbot Pi in the coming months, the startup tells TechCrunch. Users can also now export their conversations off the AI chatbot, as the new CEO shifts the company’s focus toward enterprise products.
The usage caps come just a year after Inflection raised $1.3 billion to build out the “emotionally intelligent” AI chatbot. One of the lead investors in that deal, Microsoft, hired away Inflection’s founders and most of its staff five months ago, paying $650 million to license its AI model and repay investors. At that time, Inflection said Pi had millions of weekly users.
That deal has drawn attention from antitrust regulators in the U.S. and U.K., who are now investigating whether Microsoft was anticompetitive when it effectively ate Inflection alive. Since then, CEO Sean White has steered the gutted startup through this difficult post-acqui-hire phase.
Two weeks ago, the company was planning to sunset Pi, an Inflection spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time, which is understandable considering Inflection is more resource constrained than it once was.
“We have to very carefully apply our resources,” White told TechCrunch.
Those plans have since changed, and White now says the company is committed to keeping consumer Pi afloat. However, Inflection aims to reduce the strain on its GPU resources with usage caps on the free chatbot, which Inflection says will mostly affect power users. As to the details of those caps, a spokesperson told TechCrunch that the “exact limits are still being determined.”
Inflection is also giving users a chance to move any important conversations with Pi off the chatbot. It’s partnering with the Data Transfers Initiative to allow users to export their conversations off of Pi, or theoretically import conversations from other chatbots.
White sees Inflection as setting a new standard for the AI industry in data mobility and transferability, hoping other companies will follow suit. Because Inflection is the first to make such a move, users can’t actually import their conversations with Pi to ChatGPT or any other chatbots; they can just take them off of Pi.
The path forward for Inflection may be in licensing AI models for companies to build into their own systems. White said 13,000 organizations have filled out an application showing interest in gaining API access to Pi.
“Honestly, we don’t have all the resources to deal with 13,000 requests, and so we’ve had to be fairly selective in who we start to work with,” said White.
He added that the company has held meetings with large banks, insurers and several Fortune 500 companies about potentially using its enterprise products. White claims Inflection’s fine-tuning infrastructure allows it to customize AI models to specific organizations better than competitors. He hopes to announce the first enterprise products and partnerships in the fall.