Together, it lands a $102.5 million investment to grow its cloud for training generative AI. Companies working in generative artificial intelligence continue to amass enormous sums of money to fuel their commercial and, in some cases, open-source objectives.
See Together, a business developing open-source generative artificial intelligence and AI model development infrastructure, has just announced that it has completed a Series A investment round with a total of $102.5 million. Kleiner Perkins, Nvidia, and Emergence Capital were also involved in the funding round. To extend Together’s cloud platform, which allows developers to build on open and bespoke models, the tranche, which is more than five times the size of the company’s last round of funding, will be directed toward expanding Together’s cloud platform, according to co-founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash.
In a blog post published on Together’s website this morning, Prakash said that “startups and enterprises alike are looking to build a generative AI strategy for their business that is free from lock-in to a single vendor.” Such a strategy would not be tied to a single vendor. These applications have a strong foundation thanks to open-source artificial intelligence, which releases more potent generative models almost every week. In our opinion, generative artificial intelligence is a platform technology, a new operating system for applications. It will affect human civilization and will be felt over a lengthy period. A combination of open and private models will make up the ecosystem of artificial intelligence, and it is of the utmost importance that this future includes both choices and possibilities.
Together, established in June 2022, was a venture that Vipul, Ce Zhang, Chris Re, and Percy Liang co-founded. Previously, Prakash founded the social media search engine Topsy, which Apple eventually purchased in 2013. After the acquisition, he became a senior director at Apple.
Prakash, Zhang, Re, and Liang of Together are working toward developing open-source models and services that will assist enterprises in incorporating artificial intelligence into their applications. Together, we have developed a cloud platform that allows for the execution, training, and fine-tuning of open-source models. The Together co-founders claim that this platform offers scalable computing at prices lower than the top providers, including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.
Together, it maintains a cloud that spans data centers in the United States and the European Union. This cloud also includes servers maintained by partners Crusoe Cloud and Vultr, providing around 20 exaflops of computational power in total. Pika Labs, NexusFlow, Voyage AI, and Cartesia are some of the customers of Together, and several of these customers also use the model-serving APIs that Together provides.
Vipul said, ” We can offer significant” We can infer workloads by creating custom infrastructure.” The Together AI platform gives developers the ability to swiftly integrate prominent open-source models, as well as the ability to design their models through pre-training or fine-tuning. Because of our industry-leading performance and dependability, our clients prefer to bring their generative AI workloads to Together AI. This gives them the peace of mind that they control the result of their investment in AI and are always free to run their model on any platform.
Together, it provides a consulting service that it refers to as Custom Models. This service enables clients to bring their data to the Together cloud platform and have the Together team work on designing, building, and testing a model. Together with this, the service is available as a complement to the cloud service.
AI research is another area in which Together spends extensively. RedPajama is one of the first initiatives undertaken by the business to cultivate a collection of open-source generative artificial intelligence models, including “chat” models similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Together has also released an improved version of Meta’s Llama 2 text-generating model, GPT-JT, which is a fork of the open source text-generating model GPT-J-6B (developed by the open research organization EleutherAI), and OpenChatKit, an effort to develop a rival to ChatGPT.
