Together, a startup that develops open-source artificial intelligence, announced the attraction of $20 million in investment funds as part of the initial financing round.
Source: Pixabay.com
This round was led by Lux Capital with the participation of Factory, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Robot Ventures, Definition Capital, Susa Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, and SCB 10x. Several well-known angel investors also took part, including Scott Banister, one of the co-founders of PayPal, and Jeff Hammerbacher, a founding employee of Cloudera.
Brandon Reeves of Lux Capital reported that Together is leading the Linux moment of artificial intelligence. He stated that the startup provides an open ecosystem for computing high-quality basic models. The company strives to create a dynamic ecosystem, in which both enterprises and individuals can enter the space.
Together was launched in June last year. The startup is the joint brainchild of Vipul Veda Prakash, Xie Zhang, Chris Re, and Percy Liang. Prakash previously founded the social media search platform Topsy, which was acquired in 2013 by Apple.
Together aims to create generative models and open-source artificial intelligence services that will help organizations implement AI in production applications. The startup is developing a cloud platform for launching, training, and configuring open-source models. The company says its solutions will offer scalable computing at a more affordable price compared to similar products from dominant vendors (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure).
Prakash is convinced that generative models are important as a technology useful to society. In his opinion, open and decentralized alternatives to restricted access systems are an important factor in the effectiveness of AI implementation on a global scale. He also noted that enterprises that have strategies for creating artificial intelligence define confidentiality, transparency, ease of deployment, and customization as fundamental values.
The authenticity and fairness of Prakash’s position are confirmed by an internal Google memo that has been placed at the disposal of the media, which states that in the long term, open-source artificial intelligence initiatives will have an absolute advantage in the competition process.
OpenAI is currently preparing to publicly unveil its first artificial intelligence model that is capable of creating open-source text.
One of the first projects Together is RedPajama, which is designed to develop a set of open-source generative models. Another project Together in the field of artificial intelligence is GPT-JT, an offshoot of the open-source text generation model GPT-J-6B.
Prakash says that modern solutions related to the development of AI require the developer to have experience in the field of artificial intelligence and the ability to manage large-scale infrastructure. He notes that Together solution, based on open-source generative models, was created with a clear understanding of the requirements of large organizations and their needs.
As we have reported earlier, Ascend Raises $25 Million for Pre-Seed AI Startups in Pacific Northwest.
