Pi (Inflection AI)
Pi (Inflection AI), the empathic mainstream chatbot, is filed in the graveyard's zombie wing. Cause of death: Acqui-hired, March 2024: Microsoft took two of the three founders and part of the team. The app stayed behind, capped and trimmed, while Inflection chased enterprise customers.
- Born
- 2023
- Cause of death
- Acqui-hired, March 2024: Microsoft took two of the three founders and part of the team. The app stayed behind, capped and trimmed, while Inflection chased enterprise customers.
“Still answers. In July 2026 someone started building on it again.”
The obituary
Pi launched in 2023 from Inflection AI — over a billion dollars raised, founders with DeepMind and LinkedIn pedigrees — positioned as the empathic mainstream chatbot: warm, patient, a good listener, deliberately not a productivity tool. For a stretch it was the most natural-sounding companion experience a general audience could reach without touching the girlfriend-app aisle.
On March 19, 2024, two of Inflection's three co-founders, Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, left to start Microsoft AI, and 'several members of the Inflection team' went with them, in a deal widely described as an acquisition structured not to look like one. Inflection's note that day promised 'no immediate changes to the service', named a new CEO, and turned the company toward selling models to businesses.
Then came the signals this wing watches for. In August 2024 Inflection added a chat export and announced 'a cap on message volume for free users of Pi', so Pi would not divert 'important resources' from the enterprise product. By March 2025 it had cut Pi from WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal to trim its GPU bill, and described the remaining millions of users as 'real-world test points' for its enterprise models.
The watch is not a verdict. On July 21, 2026 Inflection launched Inflection AI Labs, and its first experiment is Pi Journeys, 'a new experience that helps people navigate through different life phases'. After two years of cuts, that is a company building on Pi again. Pi stays on death watch until the Labs work becomes something users can rely on, and moves out of this wing if it does.
Sources
- Inflection: The new Inflection (2024-03-19, archived)
- Microsoft: Mustafa Suleyman joins Microsoft to lead Copilot (2024-03-19)
- Inflection: The Future of Pi (2024-08-26)
- Inflection: Little by Little, a Little Becomes a Lot (2025-03-06)
- Inflection: Inflection AI Labs and Pi Journeys (2026-07-21)
- Wikipedia — Inflection AI (Microsoft deal)
Deaths, lobotomies, and vanishings are recorded as part of our tracking methodology — the newsletter carries the obituaries as they happen.