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Inflection AI, the startup that developed the Pi AI assistant and then witnessed a massive team shuffle following the hiring of its co-founders by Microsoft, is betting on data portability. The company has announced a partnership with the non-profit Data Transfer Initiative (DTI) to help existing Pi users export their data from the platform.
While the move is not new in the broader technology space (several internet services allow data export and import), it is a significant development in the much-hyped AI domain, which has seen several vendors emerge over the last few years. Inflection hopes the partnership with DTI will give its users the flexibility to have control of their personal AI data, allowing them to move their personal and professional conversational history how they see fit. DTI is a non-profit organization formed by Apple, Meta and Google to develop tools facilitating the direct transfer of user data between services.
The step also comes as the company shifts its focus from consumer-focused Pi to enterprise-centric products. However, the company did note that the move does not mean that the Pi will be phased out. The service will continue to operate for free – with a few changes on message limits.
“This allows us to continue serving the vast majority of Pi users without diverting important resources from our forthcoming enterprise offering,” the company wrote in a blog post.
How will Inflection AI’s data portability effort take shape?
Inflection AI started in 2022 with a focus on building an “empathetic, useful and safe” AI that acts more personally and colloquially than other models, including the GPT series. The company used unique empathetic fine-tuning to give the model behind its Pi chatbot a signature personality and an exceptional emotional quotient. It released the assistant across different platforms, but the efforts were not enough for sustainable growth.
In March, when Mustafa Suleyman and several other Inflection AI staffers were roped in by Microsoft, the company announced a shift in its strategy. The company would lean into its AI studio business to craft, test and fine-tune gen AI models (like the one behind Pi) for commercial customers.
Now, several months on, as the company inches closer to bringing the enterprise product to the market, it is giving existing Pi users a way out. With the partnership with DTI, Inflection will allow users to export their chat history with the assistant to their archive or another large language model-based offering, including Inflection’s own enterprise product.
“The format of the export will be clear, documented, plain-text searchable and free from restrictive licenses so it will be easy for you to use in the future. You’ll be able to import your data with any large language model (LLM) that can support this, and we have built-in secure digital signatures so that the LLM of your choosing can support with confidence in line with the interoperability framework defined in collaboration with DTI,” the company added in the blog post.
Inflection AI noted that allowing exports is part of the company’s effort to give its users the flexibility they need to stay on their preferred AI service or have an additional copy of their interactions with the AI in hand. The Pi chatbots will continue to operate free, although the free users will have certain message limits like those on ChatGPT.
Will AI data portability become a norm?
While data portability is a norm across several online services, AI data portability is still an emerging subject, probably because most tools that are out there are only a few years old. The volume of data they hold is not as massive as that of popular internet services like Gmail.
However, as adoption grows and more people interact with these AI services, the tools will have 10-20 years’ worth of information on users. In that scenario, if the users are not satisfied with one service or if the service is shutting down, they may need the option to move their data to a different one — to continue without having their experience affected.
DTI and Inflection AI have started the work. However, it remains to be seen if other players in the industry will join, going beyond traditional chat history downloads to allow end-to-end data portability, where users could freely export and import personal AI conversations on their preferred platforms.
“It’s true that in many of the major generative AI systems, you can, today, download your conversation history. But ad-hoc download solutions are not a substitute for end-to-end portability. That takes alignment on a transparent, interoperable framework and a willingness to invest in export and import adapters to make the data 1) available and 2) usable,” Chris Riley, executive director at DTI, wrote in a separate blog post.
As the next step, Riley said DTI will focus on making import mechanisms available on other generative AI tools – helping Pi users find new homes – and kickstarting a conversation with stakeholders to define the right long-term, sustainable data model for portability.
The goal, he said, is to find something that companies can align on and that can then be built into DTI’s open-source Data Transfer Project codebase and turned into accessible, easy-to-use, server-to-server portability tools.
