Like many Silicon Valley CEOs, Sean White of Inflection accepts he may have to work with the incoming Trump Administration if called upon.
“Inflection’s focus is about building the business and great products for our customers, and in as much as we can help bend the arc of how AI works with and helps more people, through different governmental organizations and the administration, certainly we'll do that,” White said in an interview with Fortune last week.
White is in good company among a new era of tech executive-diplomats. Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Sam Altman of OpenAI have all congratulated, praised, and excused Donald Trump, the TV personality turned politician who’s latest presidential campaign veered into violent rhetoric and far-right policy ideas. Most have said they are actively seeking to work with his administration, if they haven't started already.
One executive who has not gone out of his way to hop in line for Trump is Reid Hoffman, a cofounder of Inflection, LinkedIn, and a Microsoft board member, who publicly supported President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris. He remains involved with Inflection, despite the departure of his other cofounders, Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, and most of the company's staff to Microsoft, Inflection's largest investor. The move by Microsoft to take most of Inflection's staff was investigated by several countries' competition authorities as a potentially illegal “acqui-hire.” A probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is the only one still open.
Suffice it to say, White has had a busy year since being tapped by Hoffman, a friend of many years, to become Inflection’s new CEO, not least because he was tasked with essentially rebuilding a company that was taken down to the studs. Although White has worked in tech for decades, as an executive at Mozilla and Nokia, and has started companies, he told Fortune that leading Inflection has been a unique experience. Still, he was ready for the challenge.
“I have had to grow things from zero to one before.”
Inflection now has about 70 employees after closing three acquisitions this year, and White decided the company’s focus would be more on selling an enterprise product, a version of its large language model or chatbot Pi, that is used by businesses. While there are several customers using Inflection, and new Inflection products are being built to solve specific customer needs, White declined to name any clients beyond Intel, a deal that was announced in October.
While White is focused on growing this part of the business, he is also an AI evangelist, often referring to the technology as “magic.” It doesn’t concern him that an objectively impressive use case for generative AI tools has yet to emerge. And despite most AI startups needing lots of money to stay afloat, White said he’s not currently fundraising, with “plenty of runway” left from the $1.3 billion that Inflection raised last year, a round led by Microsoft.
Read on for Fortune’s full interview with White, which has been edited for length and clarity:
Fortune: I was talking to an investor type and they said CEOs like yourself, of AI companies and startups, basically the biggest part of your job is pounding the pavement, selling-slash-raising money at all times. Would you agree with that?
Sean White: Maybe I'm a terrible CEO, I don't think that's necessarily true. I mean, look, it depends on a couple of things in terms of how you're capitalized and what you're focusing on, and certainly on the customer side, that's important. But I would never take my eye off the ball of the evolution of the technology and the products and the uses of those, okay? Because that's what I think is evolving very quickly.
Inflection having customers is something that's newer right? So, how's that going? How many customers do you have?
So we won’t talk about how many we have. We have a good, healthy pipeline. And that's mostly because a lot of these are really not prepared to do announcements.
What Inflection is offering enterprise customers is pretty pragmatic stuff. I’m not hearing a lot of magical thinking around what...
It still feels like magic for a lot of folks. I'd like to think that we’re pragmatic idealists. Like, we were doing one test, which we're now moving into a product. We initially did a sort of prototype, and the comment from a person was, ‘Oh, my God, I would use this every day.’ It wasn't, ‘Oh, my God, I’ll use this every day because it will increase my ROI by 1.23%.’ It was, ‘This feels good and by the way, it will also increase the ROI.’
I think it's exciting for us to be in dialogue with data, because treating data as an entity is a new thing. You learn a lot more from that. When you ask what does it mean to be in dialogue with your car? What does it mean to be in dialogue with the entire organization and treat that as an entity? What does it mean to be in dialogue with the planet? And actually have a conversation with that thing as an entity. And all of this is enabled by the technologies that we're building that just didn't exist a few years ago.
To get into a “dialogue with the planet,” as you said, what needs to happen? How far are we from that? And is this your version of AGI [artificial general intelligence, the point at which AI is at least as good as humans at certain tasks]?
My business is our customers, the products, earning revenue, building this company. And then I will say that I had a great conversation with a philosophy professor this morning where we were having a discussion about when human society started to separate our concept of us versus machines. We pretend that that was this ancient Greek thing, but it wasn't. And so then it’s somehow we are better than nature and distinct from machines, right? That, and just being able to start to have some of these conversations with entities or structures or data or systems that are more complex, this is an interesting starting point. I mean, if you think about the LLM that you use, which one is it? I won't be offended if you don't say Pi, but which one do you use the most?
None. I don't use any.
You don't use any of them?
No. I don't find them very useful. And I think I’ve tried them all.
So, okay, I mean, in part, what that is, when you’ve used one, is that you are having a conversation with the data that was stored on the internet. When you talk to an Intel, and they have all this data about their manufacturing, and about their sales, and about the company and its organization. But you hear all this stuff about the data wall...
That these models have been trained on all of the available data and are basically hitting a plateau [in terms of performance] because there's no more data to train them on.
I think the data wall of free things that are on the internet, we've probably hit, yeah. But the data wall of all of the data that is out there, inside every company or inside every individual and the things that they keep, we're nowhere close to hitting them.
Look, I love how this stuff is evolving. It’s not even our space, but the robotics work is going to have a whole sea change this next year, and that's going to as much as we've been sort of exploring how this impacts creativity and cognitive work. It's gonna impact physical labor. And so in that context, I still think the stuff that we do at Inflection feels like magic.
I got two messages over Thanksgiving that struck me. One was a video of someone's mom saying she used Pi all the time. So that’s wow. That's interesting. I'm not sure what that means for humanity, but it's great. In the video she was genuinely like kvelling, you know? And then the other was from a guy in India, works in IT, who said he’d had had suicidal thoughts, and he went on Reddit, and a forum suggested using Pi [to talk about his issues], and he did and said he was feeling much better. So, we discount the feel good parts of this.
So is it safe to assume that you're no longer considering turning off the consumer access to Pi?
Yeah, we don't have any plans to transfer consumer access. I think we still learn a lot from it.
When you got the call to be CEO of Inflection, I assume Reid Hoffman called you up? You guys go way back.
Yep.
And were you surprised?
I was not surprised that we would be talking about Inflection. I was surprised that Inflection was going to go through a significant leadership change.
When you accepted the job, what was your immediate plan for Inflection? Because I'll tell you, I was chatting with a couple of sources at the time. One person was just like, yeah, it's just Sean White and the chief legal officer staring at each other. Everyone’s gone.
I have had to grow things from zero to one before. And that's what I felt like. Yeah, okay, it was weird. I look at it and there's nothing that I've ever done that's ever felt like this before, which is one of the reasons why it's worth doing. There's no good playbook for it, which is to say, I cannot take credit for this amazing frontier model. I understand how to build it now, and I've built up the company. It’s almost the size, actually, I think we're a little larger than the original Inflection was now. And that's unusual, right? Like normally, when you're going 0 to 1, you don't have technology, you don't have products, you don't have any team, you don't have product market fit. And we had a lot of pieces of all of those. And, you know, it has been really exciting to then work with each piece.
It does seem like this whole AI moment has been, 'Look, here is this new, amazing technology. It's incredible. It's magical. You’ll love it.' It’s this tech that's sort of being shoved down your throat as this amazing thing, but it’s still very limited.
So one of the reasons I joined is the moment felt a lot like the moment when I've graduated from Stanford and we’d been using the Internet at school. But it hadn't really gotten into the world.
This was like the early 90s?
Yeah. And you could already feel like this is amazing, but people would be like well, 'We can already do email, yes, but this is different.' You could argue, 'Well, we didn't really know how the Internet was going to be used, either.' But there are real uses.
So with these acquisitions and product building you’re doing, are you raising money, or planning to next year? Do you still have runway left on the investment in Infection from before you started?
Ah, I don't have… I'm not ruling it out. But we have plenty of runway.
You mentioned earlier that this job feels different than anything you’ve done previously. Is that because it’s in a space with a lot of pressure, media attention, a big backer, a big valuation, and when you started off you got a few investigations, from the FTC and elsewhere, in your lap?
Um, good question. Why does it feel different? And by the way, the FTC does not move quickly. This is where we practice mindfulness, right. When I've started companies from scratch…when you're building up from zero to one, you can kind of protect your thing and make it until it's great. Then you start adding people in, and you have this wonderful organic growth. And we have that with Pi in many ways.
The enterprise work is new and it's amazing, but there is already a hungry beast looking for all of this, wanting to pull it in all these different directions, which is not the right thing if you want to be thoughtful and strategic about how you're moving. And so that is the part that has felt a little different. At Mozilla, I would expect this, having to talk to other governments of other countries, because we have, you know, many hundreds of millions of users doing all this stuff. You don't expect it as much in a situation like this [at Inflection].
So the FTC investigation is still going on, and you're participating as asked…
We are cooperating, yes. Fortunately, every single other one, so the CMA [The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority], the EU, Germany, all the other ones have closed.
Okay before you go, the inevitable Trump question. How do you feel about the incoming administration, and how are you hoping to work with them, if you are hoping to actively work with the administration? And have you talked to anybody in the transition team?
[Pause]
Come on.
Look, Inflection’s focus is about building the business and great products for our customers, and in as much as we can help bend the arc of how AI works with and helps more people, through different governmental organizations and the administration, certainly we'll do that.
Have you had any preliminary talks with anybody on the transition team yet?
I have not had any talks with people who are representatives of the transition team.
I feel like that was so specific, like I didn't ask you exactly the right way. But, okay, you're willing to participate in any way that you're asked.
By the way, we're a public benefit corp , and we will always be a public benefit corp [a company that has committed to making a "positive impact"], and I think of that as one of the things that we care deeply about. I mean, actually, you tell me, what is going to happen here? Because, I'm pretty sure you've been talking to as many folks as you can who are starting to work with the administration.
Yeah, that is true. There's a lot of reticent hope. But then you throw in Elon Musk [a key advisor to President-elect Trump] and all of it, people can become concerned.
You don't mean E, l, a, n, with the little accent…
With the O, and no accent.
Yeah, I mean, this is less about the administration, but at an AI safety dinner a couple weeks ago with the folks who had signed on to the Executive Order [15 companies made commitments to the White House around responsible AI development], it was interesting. You would like as much sharing as possible around AI safety. And there are, of course, things that you have to control very carefully. So for instance, if you are testing how to build a new biohazard, a virus, you can't share those evaluations because they contain the information that you don't want to share. But my hope is that those kinds of careful and thoughtful approaches continue, because, you know, you can imagine it otherwise being sloppy, and bad things happening.
Are you an Inflection employee or someone with insight or a tip to share? Contact Kali Hays securely through Signal at +1-949-280-0267 or at kali.hays@fortune.com.
