Latest news with #InflectionAI
Business Insider
29-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Reid Hoffman says AI can't be your friend — and pretending it can is harmful
LinkedIn cofounder and AI investor Reid Hoffman is sounding the alarm on a growing trend in the tech world: AI systems being marketed as your new best friend. "I don't think any AI tool today is capable of being a friend," Hoffman said in a Wednesday episode of the Possible podcast. "And I think if it's pretending to be a friend, you're actually harming the person in so doing." His comments came amid Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's push to embed AI companions across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and even Ray-Ban smart glasses. Last month, Zuckerberg told podcaster Dwarkesh Patel he sees AI chatbots as part of the solution to America's so-called loneliness epidemic. He cited statistics suggesting that the average American has "fewer than three friends" but has the capacity for 15. According to a 2021 report from the Survey Center on American Life, 49% of Americans report having three or fewer friends. But Hoffman drew a sharp distinction between companions and friends, saying that blurring that line erodes what it means to be human. "Friendship is a two-directional relationship," he said. "Companionship and many other kinds of interactions are not necessarily two-directional. And I think that's extremely important because it's the kind of subtle erosion of humanity." He said his theory of friendship was "two people agree to help each other become the best versions of themselves," a dynamic that involves not just emotional support, but also accountability — something no chatbot can reciprocate. "It's not only, 'Are you there for me?', but I am here for you." Hoffman praised design choices like Inflection AI's Pi assistant, which explicitly tells users, "I'm your companion," and encourages people to spend time with actual human friends. "Helping you go out into your world of friends is, I think, an extremely important thing for a companion to do," he said. As tech companies race to deploy more emotionally intelligent bots, Hoffman argued for more transparency and regulation. "We as a market should demand it, we as an industry, all MPAs, should standardize around it," he said. "And if there's confusion around this, I think we as government should say, 'Hey, look, if you're not stepping up to this, we should.'" For Hoffman, the stakes are high. "I think that's a degradation of the quality of elevation of human life," he said. "And that should not be what it's doing." Hoffman isn't alone in raising the alarm on AI companions. During a Senate testimony earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced similar concerns about AI forming personal bonds with children. When asked whether he'd want his own child to form a best-friend bond with an AI bot, he said, "I do not." He said that while adults might seek emotionally supportive relationships with AI, children require a "much higher level of protection" in how these systems interact with them. "These AI systems will get to know you over the course of your life so well. That presents a new challenge and level of importance for how we think about privacy in the world of AI," said Altman, who became a father in February.
Forbes
16-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Enterprise AI: Tailored, Secure, And Built For Business Impact
Why create an AI model focused solely for the enterprise? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Sean White, CEO at Inflection AI, on Quora: Creating an AI model for enterprise isn't just about developing a standalone model – it's about building a comprehensive ecosystem that addresses the unique challenges and requirements of large organizations. Let me break this down into several key points: First, enterprise AI requires a sophisticated architecture and orchestration system tailored to specific business needs. This isn't a one-size-fits-all solution; it's about creating an infrastructure that can seamlessly integrate with existing enterprise systems while maintaining scalability and reliability. Second, the most effective AI models for enterprise are those trained on organization-specific data. Your company's data is unique – it contains institutional knowledge, industry-specific insights, and operational patterns that generic models simply can't capture. Your employees and teams are domain experts who understand the nuances of your business, and their expertise should be reflected in your AI systems. Third, privacy and security are paramount in enterprise environments. Organizations need to maintain control over their intellectual property and sensitive information. This often means deploying AI systems on-premises or in dedicated Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). When you develop enterprise-focused AI, you're not just building models – you're creating secure systems that protect and preserve organizational intelligence. Finally, enterprise AI needs to go beyond simple information retrieval or "book reports." It requires true conversational intelligence that can engage with complex business scenarios, understand context, and provide actionable insights. This means developing models that can interpret industry-specific terminology, understand company protocols, and engage in meaningful dialogue with employees across different departments. In essence, enterprise-focused AI is about creating a complete solution that addresses the technical, data, security, and practical needs of large organizations while leveraging their unique strengths and protecting their assets. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Forbes
16-04-2025
- Forbes
Conversational AI: Merging IQ And EQ For Smarter Dialogue
Conversational AI Concept - Natural Language Processing - NLP - Computational Linguistics Concept - ... More AI-based Virtual Assistant Generating Voice as a Soud Wave How do we make AI conversationally intelligent, and why does that matter? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Sean White, CEO at Inflection AI, on Quora: Creating truly conversationally intelligent AI requires developing systems that possess both IQ (cognitive intelligence) and EQ (emotional intelligence). While AQ (Action Quotient - the ability for agents to take meaningful actions) is also crucial, we'll focus on these two fundamental pillars. Understanding IQ in AI Systems In AI, cognitive intelligence manifests as a sophisticated interplay of capabilities that enable meaningful discourse. An AI system must process and understand complex information while engaging in logical reasoning and demonstrating advanced problem-solving abilities. This means maintaining coherent dialogue across multiple conversation turns, synthesizing information from various sources to form well-reasoned conclusions, and identifying patterns that lead to appropriate generalizations. The system must also handle abstract concepts and hypothetical scenarios while demonstrating memory of previous interactions to create continuity in conversations. The Essential Role of EQ in AI Emotional intelligence in AI systems transcends basic sentiment analysis. It's not about creating emotions in AI but rather about creating systems that can truly understand and respond to the emotional undercurrents of human interaction. This involves reading and appropriately responding to emotional cues, showing genuine empathy and understanding of human experiences, and adapting communication styles based on the user's emotional state. Through these capabilities, AI systems can manage the emotional dynamics of conversation while building authentic rapport and trust with users. Why Conversational Intelligence Matters The importance of conversational intelligence extends far beyond creating more pleasant interactions. Research consistently shows that humans learn more effectively, retain information better, and make superior decisions when engaged in quality conversations. This occurs because good conversations activate deeper cognitive processing through engagement, create emotional connections that enhance memory and understanding, and enable collaborative thinking that leads to creative problem-solving. The natural flow of dialogue fosters critical thinking in ways that more structured interactions cannot match. Moreover, we're increasingly discovering that humans co-evolve with our technologies. A telling example of this phenomenon can be observed in homes with AI assistants, where families have noticed children dropping social niceties like "please" and "thank you" during interactions with these systems. This observation highlights how our interactions with AI can profoundly shape human behavior and social norms. The development of more conversationally intelligent AI can help create better communication patterns throughout society, support more productive and meaningful interactions, and foster healthier organizational cultures through improved human-AI interaction. Perhaps most importantly, it can help preserve and enhance important social skills rather than diminishing them through oversimplified interactions. Inflection's Approach to Conversational Intelligence At Inflection, our years of dedication to developing sophisticated systems and frameworks for conversational intelligence reflect our deep understanding of these principles. We've gathered over 10 million examples using specialized tools from experts in various fields, creating a unique and extensive dataset that informs our approach. By integrating this rich collection of conversational knowledge with our frontier-scale foundation models, we've been able to deploy advanced conversational capabilities across our platform. This commitment to developing truly conversational AI stems from our understanding that the future of human-AI interaction depends not just on raw computational power, but on creating systems that can engage in meaningful, emotionally intelligent dialogue. These systems should enhance rather than diminish human capabilities, serving as partners in our continued growth and development as a society. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Bloomberg
20-03-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
An AI Startup Couldn't Beat Microsoft. So It Joined Them
Reid Hoffman sat down with Mustafa Suleyman in the fall of 2023 to talk about the uncertain future of their startup, Inflection AI. From the moment they'd founded it 18 months earlier, there had seemed something can't-miss about Inflection. Hoffman was perhaps the best-connected person in Silicon Valley. Suleyman, who co-founded DeepMind and sold it to Google for $650 million in 2014, was a star in his own right, as was Inflection's other co-founder, Karén Simonyan, a top researcher in the field. Inflection's product, a chatbot named Pi, had quickly attracted millions of monthly users by communicating a sense of emotional intelligence. Inflection's founders defined success as expanding that user base into hundreds of millions, and ultimately billions, of people. Their oversize ambition, and that of their investors, was a company whose value might top $1 trillion. The startup founded in a garage or a friend's living room only to grow into tech's next Google or Facebook had always been the essence of Silicon Valley. Yet artificial intelligence called into question whether it was even possible for a startup like Inflection to follow that path, given generative AI's voracious demand for resources.
Euronews
05-03-2025
- Business
- Euronews
Microsoft's OpenAI gets green light from UK watchdog
The UK competition watchdog has dropped its review of Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, saying it's satisfied that the deal doesn't need a closer investigation under the country's merger rules. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said that based on "available evidence," the partnership between the US tech giant and the ChatGPT maker doesn't qualify for a merger investigation. 'In particular the CMA does not consider there has been a change of control by Microsoft from material influence to de facto control over OpenAI," the watchdog said. Microsoft was a big initial backer of OpenAI, plowing billions of dollars into the San Francisco-based startup in its early days. But since then OpenAI has attracted other big investors including Japan's Softbank and chipmaker Nvidia after its success with ChatGPT. "The AI sector is still rapidly evolving. Material aspects of the Partnership have been changing over the course of the investigation," the CMA added in a statement. The CMA has stepped up scrutiny of AI deals amid a wave of investment from Big Tech companies into startups working on generative artificial intelligence (AI). Last year it approved another Microsoft deal involving Inflection AI as well as partnerships with chatbot maker Anthropic by Google and Amazon.
