Hope This Is Not Goodbye to Pi
The company behind a favorite GenAI app lost two of its founders
Headlines today in the AI space highlighted a big win for Microsoft and a huge loss for Inflection, creators of the wonderful personal AI app, Pi. Inflection’s blog post on this said this about the departure of two of the company’s three founders:
Today we are also announcing that two of our three co-founders, Mustafa and Karén, will be leaving Inflection to start Microsoft AI, a new division at Microsoft that will bring together their consumer AI efforts, as well as Copilot, Bing and Edge.
Mustafa mentioned in the quote is Mustafa Suleyman, a founder of DeepMind before Inflection. I first came across him when I read his book ‘The Coming Wave’, which is one of the two most compelling books I’ve read on this new era of AI. It offers a riveting view of the amazing opportunities and terrifying risks presented by the exponential advances in AI and synthetic biology along with other general technologies that have been and will be created along with them.
When I learned that he had a new AI company I was immediately interested in seeing what that company was doing - and I found Pi. I’ve mentioned Pi in several of my posts about using AI tools, and it is my co-favorite AI app alongside Perplexity.
In my experience trying our as many different AI apps and models as I can, I have found that Pi provides one unique and powerful feature: the ability to hold a continuous conversation. Many chatbots, and even their ancestors like Google Assistant, can respond to voice prompts, and offer an audio response - but then there’s a pause, a stop. With Pi, the conversation flows until I choose to shut it down.
Inflection’s blog post on these changes is not quite a confirmation that Pi will soon be dead and gone; but it also does not contain any strong assurances that won’t happen. Here are some of the slices of their post on this:
A possible reason for short-term optimism:
We are hugely proud of what we’ve achieved with Pi. There will be no immediate changes to the service and we’re committed to ensuring that users get ongoing access to great AI experiences in the future.
And the not so reassuring words:
Our plan going forward is to lean into our AI studio business, where custom generative AI models are crafted, tested and fine tuned for commercial customers.
Here’s hoping that one way or another Pi survives and thrives, with Inflection or new owners. If it doesn’t, I’m sure it won't be the last personal AI and I imagine at least some of the new ones will be even better than Pi.
If you’re not a subscriber, here’s a few recent posts you might want to check out:
I had the exact same thought when I first read the news.
It's especially unexpected in light of their recent blog posts celebrating how popular Pi was with users and how many platforms it's acessible from.
Here's hoping that Pi continues chugging along despite the shift in focus toward APIs.
PS: I'm halfway through the "The Coming Wave" book myself. It's a great read so far.