AI Hustle: News on Open AI, ChatGPT, Midjourney, NVIDIA, Anthropic, Open Source LLMs: AI21 Labs Secures $155M in Funding for Enterprise Generative AI

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So today I'm excited to announce AIBOX.

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The platform lets you build apps by linking together AI models like chatGPT, mid-journey

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So the big headline here is the fact that AI21 Labs has just raised $155 million to

accelerate generative AI for the enterprise.

Now this is often called kind of an open AI or chatGPT competitor.

And I think what's really interesting here is that this is actually a Tel Aviv based

leader in large language models.

And this is actually their series C-Found Round of Funding that they have essentially

just closed.

So the goal here is really aiming to expedite the growth of their text-based generative

AI services for enterprise clients.

I think the significant capital injection evaluates the company at around $1.4 billion

after the close of this round, which is very impressive.

We're not seeing a ton of companies doing this.

There are a handful, but they're definitely pushing this past unicorn status and they're

in the big leagues now.

So I think the roster of investors participating in this funding round is noteworthy.

They have investors, they have Walden Catalyst, Potango, as well as strategic investors including

SCB10X, B2 Ventures, and Samsung Next.

So tech giants like Google and NVIDIA also contributed to the round along with individual

investor Amnon Sheshua.

So I think what's really interesting, this company was actually just established AI21

was back in 2017, and they have a team of really solid AI trailblazers in there.

And they have been instrumental in essentially democratizing generative AI, or a lot of people

say that about them in any case.

So despite their early achievements, the company has been navigating an increasingly competitive

landscape, often being compared to rivals such as OpenAI.

During a $64 million series B last year, you have Shoham, an emeritus professor of AI at

Stanford University, observed that the market for LLMs and multimodal models was growing

more saturated.

He acknowledged this evolving landscape in an interview with VentureBeat, saying that

the company is, quote, very aware of the environment and not complacent in any way.

So AI21 Labs technology is really kind of underpinned by its proprietary Jurassic 2 foundation

models, which stand as some of the largest and most advanced LLMs globally.

And these models fuel AI21 Studio, which is a developer platform designed for crafting

custom text-based business applications, and WordTune, which is a multilingual AI-powered

reading and writing assistant targeted at professionals and general consumers.

So I think the thing to kind of note here with AI21 and their angle on this is they're

really kind of focused on the enterprise.

And I think up until now, that was a business model that in my opinion could fly, right?

That's like, yeah, you know, OpenAI is really kind of targeting chat should be tea for everyone.

This is more for like the enterprise and I'm sure they have special like security and accuracy

things for the enterprise.

But I think now with OpenAI kind of hiviting a little bit and making a lot more enterprise

products, specifically chat should be tea enterprise.

I've seen a ton of excitement, enthusiasm and interest from enterprises and getting

that integrated.

And I'm sure that AI21 is facing a lot more competition right now, something that I think

is really interesting.

And I know everyone has different approaches to business.

But one thing I've seen OpenAI do successfully, I've seen other companies like Canva do it

is they essentially focus on the masses first.

If you can get mass market adoption with something, it makes a lot easier to move to the enterprise

because as some tweets that I was recently seen from people talking about chat should

be the enterprise said, they were essentially like tallying up how many people in their

company were already using chat should be the like, yeah, we already have, you know,

20 people that are personally playing paying for chat should be in our company.

Let's just get, you know, chat should be the enterprise, we get more security and everything,

you know, then we don't have to make our employees pay for a software that they're using for

work and plus then we can have a kind of secure and worried about any company data leaking,

yada, yada.

The point being that it started out as the masses, so their employees were using anyways

and then it moved up to the enterprise because, you know, the employees saw the value in it.

And so I think there's some, of course, that's harder to do because hitting the masses and

getting the scale that chat should be got is very difficult to replicate.

But if possible, you know, you saw the same thing with Canva, how they were a very simple

tool that like I remember using in college for simple graphic design stuff that when

I got my first corporate job, I got everyone in the company using Canva because they had

already made team features and corporate features and had a whole bunch of really more

sophisticated stuff, but it was a very simple way.

So start with the masses.

If you get some mass adoption, product market fit, then I think it's quite a lot easier

to move it into the enterprise versus something like it would appear AI21 Labs concept here

is like we're going straight to the enterprise because if you're only in the enterprise and

you are not able to get that mass market adoption, that perhaps product market fit, it's a little

bit difficult to go the other way around.

So in any case, I think AI21 Labs technology is quite impressive.

The chairman, Amaran Shusa, elaborated on the company's vision in a press release saying

AI21 Labs is a pure play in AI as it develops and owns foundation models which are served

as a platform to developers and enterprise will developing derivatives such as word tune

directly to end users.

The current round fuels the growth for the company to reach its goal of developing the

next level of AI with the capabilities of reasoning across many domains.

We believe that the impact of AI21 Labs growth plans would be of global scale and quite soon.

So I mean, it appears that right here, they're looking for the global scale, they're looking

for the mass market, they said quite soon, I'm not sure how soon that is.

It's not, it's to be honest, it's like I've never used word tune or any of their products

to date.

So perhaps it's great, I'll definitely have to test it out.

But I think time's a ticking and if they really want to get that mass growth, they're

going to have to either do something very different or have it be very cheap, which

is hard to compete because Chatchapiti is also free.

They got to find some really unique angles that other people are not doing because they're

not super late to the game.

But if they've had this technology in the bag for a long time, they probably should

have released this to the public sometime when Chatchapiti released to not get super

left behind.

See what Anthropic did.

I think Anthropic did a great job of not getting super left behind, even though Claude is only

available on the Po2 platform.

I know a ton of people that have seen a couple of different features in Claude, Anthropic's

Claude chatbot that Chatchapiti didn't do, namely that it has way bigger context windows

so you can put way more text in there.

That's super useful and I literally use it for that sometimes.

Sometimes I've pasted a bunch of stuff into Chatchapiti that your prompt's too long so

I'm like, okay, whatever, I go over to Claude and use it.

And so good move on Anthropic's Claude, a lot of people know it and have tested it.

And I think they have a bright future because they were able to get in early so I do hope

that AI21 really starts thinking about that and making sure that they're going because

time's a ticket and the time to capitalize on this is definitely now.

So echoing the optimism about AI21 lab's trajectory, Jensen Huang, who's the founder

and CEO of NVIDIA, commented in the same press release saying, generative AI is driving a

new era of computing across every industry, the innovative work by AI21 lab's team will

help enterprises accelerate productivity and efficiency with generative AI based systems

that are accurate, trustworthy and reliable.

So I think in terms of its industry reach, AI21 labs has been working with a bunch of

different customers across various sectors.

So they have Car4, Clarevat, eBay, Guesty, Monday.com, Ubisoft.

So I think the company's recently has kind of earned a spot on the inaugural CB Insight

Gen AI 50 list, which is recognizing its impact on general intelligence or artificial intelligence.

So I think it's going to be interesting to see where they go.

I've already mentioned my opinion on a lot of it, but I think there's definitely hope

for them.

I think they just got to start pushing the envelope and get known to more of a broader

user base.

If you are looking for an innovative and creative community of people using chatGPT, you need

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podcasts and I'll see you tomorrow.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.