Artificial intelligence (AI) company Inflection AI has raised $1.3bn in a funding round led by Microsoft.

The round, which was also joined by Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and new backer NVIDIA, brings the total funds raised to $1.52bn.

Inflection AI, which is based in Palo Alto, California, has developed large language models that power its AI assistant, Pi, the company’s first offering.

According to the firm, Pi is designed to be a “kind and supportive” assistant to provide natural, flowing text and voice chats, helpful advice, and succinct information.

The company will use the proceeds to build and develop Pi, which was launched last month.

Inflection AI CEO and co-founder Mustafa Suleyman said: “Personal AI is going to be the most transformational tool of our lifetimes. This is truly an inflection point. We are excited to collaborate with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and CoreWeave as well as Eric, Bill and many others to bring this vision to life.”

Inflection AI is also building what it calls the “largest AI cluster in the world” using 22,000 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core graphics processing units (GPUs) in collaboration with CoreWeave and NVIDIA.

Once operational, the AI cluster is expected to support the training and deployment of new large-scale AI models.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said: “A powerful benefit of the AI revolution is the ability to use natural, conversational language to interact with supercomputers to simplify aspects of our everyday lives.

“The world-class team at Inflection AI is helping to lead this groundbreaking work, deploying NVIDIA AI technology to develop, train and deploy massive generative AI models that enable amazing personal digital assistants.”

Microsoft CTO and EVP AI Kevin Scott said: “It is an exciting time, and ambitious AI companies like Inflection AI are pioneering the industry with transformative products that are accessible, easy to use, and show the many possibilities of AI.”