The heat of artificial intelligence continues, and the investment boom is only increasing.
Recently, Israeli startup AI21 Labs announced the completion of a $155 million Series C financing to accelerate the growth of its enterprise-oriented text-based generative AI. Investors in this round of financing include Walden Catalyst, Pitango, and participation from Google and Nvidia.
The new round of financing brings AI21 Labs' total financing to $283 million, and its total valuation has exceeded $1.4 billion. According to the company, this financing will be an important milestone in its research and development of generative AI.
AI21 Labs has its own exclusive large model, Jurassic-2, which is considered one of the largest and most complex large models in the world. Due to its authentic and reliable content generation, AI21 Labs is also seen as a strong competitor to OpenAI.
01. One of the earliest companies to bring AI to the public
AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 in Tel Aviv, the second largest city in Israel, by AI pioneers and technology veterans Yoav Shoham, Professor Amnon Shashua, and Ori Goshen. The company is dedicated to developing a series of text generation AI tools and is one of the earliest companies to bring generative AI to the public.
Its founding team has rich entrepreneurial experience. Yoav Shoham is an honorary professor at Stanford University, and AI21labs is the third company he has founded, with his previous two companies being sold to Google. Ori Goshen is the founder of CrowdX, a telecommunications analytics and network optimization startup, and Chairman Amnon Shashua is the founder of the autonomous driving company Mobileye.
In October 2020, AI21 Labs launched its first product, Wordtune, a AI-based writing assistant that can understand context and suggest meanings and rewrites, which is the company's main source of revenue.
In August 2021, the company launched AI21 Studio, a developer platform for building custom text-based business applications from AI language models. In the same month, it launched the natural language processing system Jurassic-1, covering a vocabulary of over 250,000 words.
On August 31, 2023, the company announced the completion of a $155 million Series C financing, further strengthening AI21 Labs' position as a leader in generative AI unicorns.
Currently, AI21's proprietary Jurassic-2 base model is considered one of the largest and most complex LLMs in the world, supported by AI21 Studio.
02. Reshaping writing and reading with AI
The founders of AI21 limit AI to the reshaping of writing and reading, as evidenced by their flagship product Wordtune and the main product AI21 Studio.
Flagship product: AI21 Studio
The company's flagship product is AI21 Studio, a B2B paid platform for developers, providing access to customizable Jurassic-2 and task-specific language models through APIs, enabling text generation and comprehension for thousands of real-time applications. It currently supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch.
AI21 Studio has base models and task-specific models. The base model is a general language model capable of handling any language task, including text generation, summarization, and translation. After training, the Jurassic-2 model can follow natural language instructions without needing any examples to adapt to new tasks.
According to the HELM language model evaluation at Stanford University, the Jurassic-2 model is one of the highest-ranking models in terms of accuracy and reliability. Jurassic-2 offers three sizes: Ultra, Mid, and Light, each with a separately tuned version.
Task-specific models refer to models trained and optimized for specific tasks across use cases and industries. AI21 Studio offers a plug-and-play AI API engine, Contextual Answers, which allows for large-scale language model technology on enterprise data without the need for NLP expertise, creating exceptional AI reading and writing experiences.
In task-specific models, there are examples available for specific industries, such as a text editor that enhances writing skills, retail software for writing product descriptions according to specified requirements, a help platform that answers internal storage knowledge and provides instant answers to users, and a content management system for generating large documents or article summaries on a large scale.
If interested, you can create an account on AI21 Studio, and the official website offers flexible pay-as-you-go plans and a large number of free trial points.
Writing assistant: Wordtune
If AI21 Studio gives access to Jurassic-2, then Wordtune is a deeply ingrained writing refinement tool. Wordtune's design concept is unique, as it does not directly help users create text but rather rephrases it using AI.
Wordtune successfully plays the role of a user's AI writing assistant through rewriting and refining. Users do not need to worry about grammar or spelling errors, as Wordtune can provide personalized rewriting suggestions from words to sentences to paragraphs in the user's writing style. For different document applications, Wordtune provides a variety of formatting templates, from emails to promotional posts and more.
Wordtune not only allows users to choose but also helps create a personal knowledge base and find facts, as AI will automatically retrieve from at least 5 sources and select credible sources for use.
Even on mainland websites, we can see many users giving high ratings and recommendations for Wordtune. Just as Wordtune's slogan is to inspire professional potential, everyone has a lot of work to do, and some people accept setbacks, while smart people choose Wordtune to speed up their tasks.
After its launch in 2020, Wordtune was quickly rated by Google as one of the most popular extensions of 2021. AI21 Studio has not stagnated but has continued to upgrade along this product, followed by the development of Wordtune Read, which focuses on assisting long-form reading, and this year's release of Wordtune Spices with over a dozen rewriting methods.
But AI21 Studio has not forgotten the original intention of the product, which is to always unleash human creativity, with AI being just a pair of wings to help people create.
03. Applications across various industries
With its outstanding competitive advantage and extensive partnerships, AI21 Labs has quickly emerged. Through its advanced language models and natural language processing technology, it has provided efficient and accurate solutions for clients in various industries such as gaming, services, and education.
Easyway: AI enhances hotel customer experience
Easyway is a customer relationship management platform designed to help luxury hotels communicate with guests through instant messaging applications, providing high-quality customer service. By integrating with AI21, Easyway has successfully achieved automated and personalized customer interactions.
- Feature 1: Intent detection
With the help of AI21's large language model, Easyway can accurately analyze intent with high precision, currently having 15 emotion analysis models based on common questions. By analyzing guests' questions and emotions, it can accurately understand their needs.
- Feature 2: Automatic translation
To meet the needs of travelers from different countries, Easyway has implemented high-quality bidirectional translation using AI21's technology, supporting over 100 languages. Hotel staff and guests can freely communicate in their native languages, with AI automatically translating during the conversation.
In fact, this feature was already in production before Easyway contacted AI21. However, there is still a lot of room for improvement, as the company stated, "One of the problems we must solve is the different grammar levels of end users."
Currently, Easyway plans to further expand their automation capabilities by tapping into the potential of AI21 to achieve more intelligent customer interactions.
Ubisoft: AI leads a new era of game development
Ubisoft is one of the world's leading video game giants, known for creating games such as "Assassin's Creed," "Just Dance," and "Watch Dogs." The company has always been committed to creating rich and immersive gaming experiences. In order to improve game development efficiency and quality, Ubisoft has begun to widely use artificial intelligence technology and, through collaboration with AI21, has successfully addressed many challenges in traditional game development.
- Feature 1: Automation of Tedious Tasks
In the game development process, Ubisoft encounters a large number of tedious task designs, such as NPC dialogue writing and mission design in script writing. To save time and improve efficiency, Ubisoft's internal models can use the output results of AI21 as a starting point, without the need to painstakingly express motivations in 5-10 different ways.
Swanson, head of Ubisoft's research center, said, "This allows our writers to immediately get to work, which is simply an inspirational tool for them."
- Feature 2: Data Augmentation Needs
Ubisoft must use internal models to create an automatic interpretation game engine, but manual data tweaking often takes a long time. With AI21, Ubisoft can generate thousands of inputs and manually select the best ones for editing. This allows for the efficient and rapid generation of more diverse and unique game elements.
Swanson said, "Through collaboration with AI21, we have unlocked an infinite source of training data, no matter what precise format we need."
Regarding AI21 Labs, Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, stated, "The innovative work of the AI21 Labs team will help enterprises accelerate productivity and efficiency, providing accurate, reliable, and trustworthy generative AI-based systems."
Looking to the future, AI21 Labs will continue to enhance natural language processing technology and apply it to a wider range of fields.
04. More Efficient Human-Machine Collaboration than General Large Models
Referring to AI21 as the biggest competitor to OpenAI and Cohere is not just "empty talk." Unlike ChatGPT, AI21 provides users with smaller, more precise task models, significantly reducing the number of "hallucinations" (false information presented by the AI engine as if it were real).
Amnon Shashua, co-founder of the Israeli company, mentioned in an interview, "We found our own way to reduce the occurrence of hallucinations through creative solutions, such as referencing algorithms to external language model libraries." This innovative approach allows AI21 to provide users with more accurate and reliable text generation services, thereby improving the efficiency and quality of human-machine collaboration.
Co-founder Yoav Shoham also stated in an interview that when competing with OpenAI for enterprise business, AI21 Labs "usually wins" because its enterprise AI solutions are more stable and reliable.
Undoubtedly, the track where AI21 Labs is located is hot, and their primary task at the moment may be to expand their scale, strengthen their team, actively engage in technological innovation, and steadily advance in the enterprise AI market.
A report from the IBM Institute for Business Value mentioned, "In the coming years, the use of generative artificial intelligence will dominate all roles and levels within the entire organization." With more companies dedicated to creating specific solutions, such as AI21, joining in, the next stage of artificial intelligence may be even more exciting than a world filled with general large models.
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