AI21 Labs nabs $64M to ramp up AI-powered language services –
Summary
Sitting somewhere in the middle is AI21 Labs, an Israeli company that developed a model Jurassic-1 Jumbo, which is roughly the size of GPT-3 and slowly built products around it, including an AI-as-a-service platform called AI21 Studio that lets customers create virtual assistants, chatbots, content moderation tools and more.Investors sense an opportunity, evidently. AI21 Labs currently has 120 employees and plans to hire around 50 more by the end of the year, defying the macroeconomic trend.Fortunately, the pandemic has positively impacted business as more companies migrated to remote work, individuals needed to convey in written text what they would normally share verbally, Goshen told TechCrunch in an email interview. [Our] proprietary large language models core capabilities allow for the ingestion of massive amounts of corporate data use to do custom content creation, summarization, and classification.AI21 Labs was co-founded in 2017 by Goshen, Shashua, and Stanford University professor Yoav Shoham. In June, AI21 Labs launched a chatbot modeled on the legal opinions of the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that several AI technology experts characterized as misleading. But he said that Studio has hundreds of paying clients and design partners none of which he was willing to identify by name in addition to over 10,000 users of its free plan, while Wordtune has millions of users.Given the cost of training sophisticated models, theres likely significant investor pressure to expand.