LinkedIn’s Co-Founder Reid Hoffman has a New Company

It was roughly six years ago that Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, sold his company to Microsoft for a cool $26.2 billion.

Hoffman has now co-founded another company, the first since his sale of LinkedIn in 2016. His new business is being created with DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and former DeepMind researcher Karén Simonyan.

The billionaire has helped to start a new artificial intelligence start-up called Inflection AI.

This is also the first company Suleyman has co-founded since he sold DeepMind to Google in 2014 for around $600 million.

Inflection will be led by Suleyman, who will take on the role of CEO.

“AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time,” Hoffman said in a statement with CNBC. “Mustafa has been at the forefront of some of the most exciting advances in artificial intelligence. It’s a privilege to join him and Karen in building Inflection.”

It was just weeks ago that Suleyman announced he was quitting his VP role at Google to work alongside Hoffman at Greylock Partners, a renowned venture capital firm.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Inflection will aim to develop AI software products that make it easier for humans to communicate with computers.

“If you think about the history of computing, we have always been trying to reduce the complexity of our ideas in order to communicate them to a machine,” Suleyman told CNBC.

“Even when we write a search query, we’re simplifying, we’re reducing or we’re writing in shorthand so that the search engine can understand what we want.”

It’s unclear at this stage who Inflection will sell its products to, at what price, and when.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.