AI21 Labs, a Tel Aviv-based startup growing a spread of text-generating AI instruments, has raised $155 million in a Sequence C funding spherical led by Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Subsequent and Amnon Shashua, the founding father of Intel-owned Mobileye and an AI21 Labs co-founder. Google and Nvidia additionally participated.
The tranche, which brings AI21 Labs’ whole raised to $283 million, values the corporate at $1.4 billion — a bit larger than the determine The Info reported earlier as we speak ($1.2 billion).
“AI21 Labs got here out of stealth in October 2020 with our first launch of [AI writing tool] Wordtune,” Yoav Shoham, certainly one of AI21 Labs’ co-CEOs, informed TechCrunch through e-mail. “Since then, we’ve solely managed to develop, greater than doubling our workforce with plans so as to add much more staff.”
AI21 Labs was based in 2017 by Shashua, Shoham and Ori Goshen, the startup’s different co-CEO. Shoham, a professor emeritus at Stanford, beforehand bought two firms to Google, the time administration app Timeful and social community mates organizer Katango. Goshen can also be a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded and led a number of Israel-based tech firms, together with the telco analytics agency Crowdx.
AI21 Labs’ flagship product is AI21 Studio, a pay-as-you-go developer platform for constructing customized text-based enterprise apps off of AI21’s proprietary text-generating AI fashions — together with its cutting-edge Jurassic-2 mannequin. The startup additionally sells entry to the aforementioned Wordtune, a multilingual studying and writing AI assistant akin to Grammarly.
Prospects can faucet AI21 Labs’ platform through APIs for particular generative AI use instances, like summarization, paraphrasing and grammar and spelling correction. The startup’s fashions help a rising variety of languages, together with Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch.
AI21 Labs competes with an increasing roster of startups and incumbents within the red-hot generative AI area.
Google, AWS and Microsoft provide tooling akin to AI21 Studio, as do startups like Cohere, OpenAI and Anthropic (and to a lesser extent marketing-focused distributors equivalent to Jasper, Regie and Typeface). And AI21 Labs is at a funding drawback; OpenAI has raised $11.3 billion thus far, whereas Anthropic and Cohere have raked in $1.6 billion and $435 million, respectively.
However Shoham asserts that AI21 Labs’ options are superior in a number of elements, regardless of wanting related on the floor and never having the advantage of a better R&D finances.
For one, Shoham says, they’re developed on “a number of the world’s largest and most subtle massive language fashions” and provide “extra refined management” than many generative AI apps in the marketplace. Furthermore, they’re skilled on up-to-date knowledge, in contrast to text-generating fashions skilled on older knowledge, which might’t precisely reply questions on present occasions.
AI21 Labs provides a spread of tuning parameters to customise the output of its language fashions, which vary from small, quick fashions to bigger and extra subtle choices. Picture Credit: AI21 Labs
“The AI21’s AI programs are straightforward to combine and generate dependable, reliable and correct outcomes,” Shoham mentioned. “The standard and amount of coaching knowledge is a large problem within the trade. We’ve labored laborious to make sure that we’re utilizing up-to-date knowledge, continuously coaching our fashions on extra knowledge and dealing to make sure that the information used is dependable and reliable.”
Having not examined AI21 Labs’ merchandise lately, I can’t communicate to the veracity of these claims. However exaggerated or no, AI21 Labs seems to be gaining some traction regardless of its disadvantages.
Shoham — who wouldn’t reveal the scale of AI21 Labs’ buyer base, save that it contains “a number of” Fortune 100 firms — says that Wordtune alone has over 10 million customers. And AI21 Labs was a launch associate for Bedrock, Amazon’s generative AI app growth platform.
Shoham says that the most recent funding tranche will permit AI21 Labs to speed up its R&D efforts and “attain its purpose of growing the following degree of AI,” with “the capabilities of reasoning throughout many domains.” AI21 Labs additionally plans to pursue extra partnerships with firms “throughout all the tech ecosystem” and enhance its 200-person headcount, with a principal deal with roles in analysis and enterprise growth.
AI21 Labs continues to construct out its C-Suite, as nicely, lately hiring Pankaj Dugar, a former Google and Databricks exec, as its SVP of go-to-market and GM of North America.
It’ll actually want the cash, given the capital-intensive nature of growing massive language fashions.
In accordance to The Info, OpenAI spent $540 million final 12 months creating ChatGPT. And AI21 Labs’ personal analysis pegs the bills for coaching a text-generating mannequin with 1.5 billion parameters (i.e. variables that the mannequin makes use of to generate and analyze textual content) at as a lot as $1.6 million. For reference, the predecessor to AI21 Labs’ Jurassic-2 mannequin, Jurassic-1, contained 178 billion parameters.
That’s not accounting for internet hosting prices to serve the fashions.
OpenAI was at one level reportedly paying as much as $700,000 a day to maintain the infrastructure internet hosting ChatGPT up and working. Again-of-the-napkin math pegs the price of working a mannequin the scale of GPT-3, and older OpenAI-developed mannequin, at $87,000 per 12 months on a service like AWS.
AWS counts AI21 Labs as a associate, so it’s not clear if there’s some form of quantity discounting in play. However I’d wager to say that it’s not insignificant overhead.
“We’ve targeted on rising responsibly, permitting us to proceed to develop and broaden, bringing our clients essentially the most up-to-date, reliable AI potential,” Shoham mentioned.
