The hot new thing: AI platforms that stop AIs mistakes before production
Summary
Today, a months-old, four-person, Bay Area-startup called Braintrust is taking the wraps off its own fresh funding round of $3 million. “Super nerdy” as a teenager, he says a linear algebra class in high school where he learned about Google’s PageRank algorithm would change his life. He moved on from biology, studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, then “out of extreme boredom” dropped out his junior year to build a relational database system at MemSQL, an early Y Combinator alum. “I spent quite some time building old-school software,” he says, “and what’s really different about AI is that it’s inherently non deterministic, meaning if you write code, you can’t really guarantee that it’s going to work. But it’s really hard for us to boil that down into a representative set of examples that we can use to test our software.” With BrainTrust, he says, “They can dump as much data as they want into our product, run evaluations against it, and we’ll help them curate ‘golden datasets’ that they can accumulate over time and use as a measure of whether their software is working or not.” As a bonus, says Goyal, “We actually run inside of their cloud environments,” which enables Braintrust to operate around thorny compliance issues that could otherwise slow down its adoption within enterprises.
