Reid Hoffman, co-founder of the professional social network LinkedIn, Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Deepmind, and Karén Simonyan, formerly a Deepmind researcher and deep learning expert, have co-founded a new Artificial Intelligence-focused software company, Inflection AI, which aims to facilitate human-computer interactions.

Reid Hoffman, pioneer, writer, investor and billionaire

Born in Palo Alto, California, on August 5, 1967, Reid Garrett Hoffman studied at Stanford University where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1990 and a Master of Philosophy degree at Oxford University. At the age of twelve, he worked as an editor for the game company Chaosium. He created SocialNet.com, an online dating site by matching members by interest, before launching the famous LinkedIn company in early 2003, along with two former colleagues from SocialNet.com, of which he was CEO until 2007.

In 2014, Linkedin had 332 million members, a figure that rose in 2020 to 675 million. Microsoft bought LinkedIn in June 2016 for more than 628 million. Deepmind aims to find ” the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms.” Renowned for its Alphago program, which beat several Go champions before achieving a definitive victory over the world’s No. 1 in 2017, or AlphaFold, which can predict the structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences, DeepMind works on rational and predictive reasoning, as well as deep learning and deep reinforcement learning methods.

Inflection AI

Since the sale of LinkedIn in 2016, Reid Hoffman had not co-founded a new company just like Mustafa Suleyman since Deepmind’s. It is with Karén Simonyan expert in deep learning who, according to Suleyman played a key role in breakthroughs such as AlphaZero, AlphaFold, WaveNet and BigGAN, that the two men have co-founded Inflection AI whose CEO will be Mustafa Suleyman. Reid Hoffman states:

“AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time. Mustafa has been at the forefront of some of the most exciting advances in artificial intelligence. It is a privilege to join him and Karen in building Inflection. “

The AI-focused company aims for machines to be able to understand natural human language, so we no longer have to adapt our language to what machines can understand, whether it’s a command to a voice assistant or a search engine term. Mustafa Suleyman stated:

“When humans want to control a computer, they have to learn a programming language to provide instructions, or use a mouse to navigate and interact with the elements on the screen. All of these are ways to simplify our ideas and reduce their complexity and, in some ways, their creativity and uniqueness to make a machine do something. “

The company is incubated on Greylock, the venture capital firm Reid Hoffman joined that has invested in Airbnb, Roblox and Discords, among others. It’s not yet clear how or when Inflection will sell its products, but Mustafa Suleyman said the company will give more details about its future products in a few months.

Translated from Inflection AI, nouvelle société de logiciels fondée par Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman et Karén Simonyan