Competing with what OpenAI has achieved in just a few months is hard. Even then, a lot of VCs are funding the competitors. Moreover, a lot of startups working in the hiding to avoid being compared with the Microsoft-funded giant are slowly crawling out in the open.
Most recently, Reka, an AI startup founded by former Google, DeepMind, Baidu, Meta, and Microsoft researchers, announced that it now wants to emerge out of the stealth mode and unveiled its series A funding of $58 million. The funding round was led by DST Global Partners and Radical Ventures, along with Snowflake Ventures. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman also took part in the investment after his recent investment in ElevenLabs.
Yi Tay, one of the founders of the Reka AI Labs said that the company is still in the early stages of this new AI revolution and wants to be part of the innovations in the field. He highlighted the two goals of the company — to build generative models and push for frontiers in AI research — and plan to use this fund to work towards that.
We’re coming out of stealth with $58M in funding to build generative models and advance AI research at @RekaAILabs
Language models and their multimodal counterparts are already ubiquitous and massively impactful everywhere.
That said, we are still at the beginning of this… pic.twitter.com/uDI8nWI7Iq— Yi Tay (@YiTayML) June 27, 2023
The research focused founders are motivated to work on what they call ‘universal intelligence”, which means general-purpose multimodal and multilingual agents, which are also self-improving AI models, while designing them for specifically enterprise softwares. Reka is also hiring for both – technical and non-technical roles.
Where does it stand?
Similar to OpenAI’s mentioned mission of “benefitting of humanity”, Reka’s mission statement says, “build generative AI models for the benefit of humanity, organisations, and enterprises”. Interestingly, the company’s head office is also based in San Francisco. This definitely gives it an advantage over the recently funded Mistral AI startup based in Paris, which might struggle with the EU’s stringent AI policies like GDPR. Mistral.AI’s mission is also similar to Reka’s — to build generative AI which would be beneficial for enterprise. Though it is not yet clear if the company advocates for open source.
Read: This AI Startup from Paris Raises Highest Seed Funding Ever
When it comes to the founders of the company, the expertise is clearly visible. Tay, Dani Yogatama, Qi Liu, and Cyprien de Masson d’Autume, have worked for big projects at Google, Microsoft, and Meta, including DeepMind’s AlphaCode, Bard, and Gopher. The founders realised while working on these projects that expecting to build an all encompassing LLM for all possible use cases is not practical.
Yogatama told TechCrunch, “We understand the transformative power of AI and would like to bring the benefits of this technology to the world in a responsible way.” The company shows interest in building smaller models, instead of larger ones like GPT-4, that can be incorporated for different use cases.
Rob Toews from Radical Ventures also told Reuters that, “I think small models are going to represent a massive paradigm shift as enterprises are getting more serious about deploying AI models at scale.” The vision of the investors and the founders are aligned.
What’s the future?
The company’s only product, which is still in beta testing, is Yasa, a multimodal AI assistant for images, videos, and understanding tabular data, something very similar to what OpenAI is building with GPT-4. Users can insert their proprietary data on the bot and it will derive insights from it, for which the company also provides its API. This is something that OpenAI has been trying to push with plugins and new updates to its APIs.
Reka isn’t generating revenue yet, according to Yogatama. Using the funding, the company aims to acquire computing power from NVIDIA. This is clearly an aim to run for the big guns. To start, Snowflake Computing, the company which recently also partnered with NVIDIA, is allowing users to use Reka on its server. Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake, told Reuters that the company’s partnership is to guarantee its users privacy while using such AI models. This announcement also just comes after Databricks, a Snowflake competitor, acquired MosaicML in a $1.3 billion deal.
Only time will tell if any startup can outshine OpenAI. India is clearly very far off. Mistral AI would face restrictive challenges in Europe. Reka still has to prove what it can do. Competition is only going to go upwards with Y Combinator announcing that one-third of its latest batch of companies are specifically focused on building AI products, that too specially in the hub of OpenAI, San Francisco. For now, OpenAI needs to be careful, as a lot of its members are also reportedly leaving the company to join Google – its biggest rival.
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