TogetherAI: Transforming AI Access for All
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Unveiling TogetherAI: Revolutionizing AI for Everyone
San Francisco-based TogetherAI is making waves with its mission to democratize AI through an open-source cloud platform, backed by significant investments totaling $135 million. Let's dive into the key aspects that have stirred excitement in the tech community.
Funding Triumph
- Recently secured a substantial $102.5 million in a Series A investment from notable backers like NVIDIA, Kleiner Perkins, and Emergence Capital.
- Previous seed funding of $32.5 million, including contributions from Lux Capital, brought its valuation to an impressive $200 million.
AI Democratization Vision
- CEO Vipul Ved Prakash emphasizes the future of AI lies in open source, becoming a major force in how organizations implement generative AI.
Leading Product: Forge
- Forge, Together AI's flagship product, contributes 90% of the company's revenue.
- Launched in June, Forge offers a comprehensive solution, providing startups with computing resources and model training software in a single package.
Economic Advantage
- Forge's cost-effectiveness stands out, offering access to Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips at 20% of the cost compared to major cloud providers.
- Positioned as a strong competitor, potentially surpassing Nvidia’s own GPU cloud service.
Robust Infrastructure
- Boasts a powerful computing infrastructure, scaling up to a remarkable 20 exaflops across multiple data centers in the US and EU.
- Collaborates with AI cloud leaders like Crusoe Cloud and Vultr, tailored for high-performance AI applications.
Diverse Open-Source Models
- Success fueled by a diverse repository of open-source models, including Llama 2, Stable Diffusion, and the popular RedPajama.
- RedPajama stands out on model hub Hugging Face, with its 2.8 billion parameter version downloaded nearly 20,000 times last month.
Industry-Leading Performance
- Positioned alongside high-profile startups CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, and Foundry Technologies.
- Thriving amidst the ongoing GPU shortage, collectively raising billions to meet the demand.
Core Research Contributions
- Commitment to core research evident in groundbreaking efforts like the RedPajama-V2 dataset, the largest open dataset with 30 trillion tokens for training Language Models (LLMs).
- Unveiled FlashAttention v2, a pivotal innovation used by leading entities such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral.
Stellar Founding Team
- Boasts a distinguished lineup of founders, including Stanford professor Percy Liang, SambaNova Systems co-founder Chris Ré, and former Apple executive Vipul Ved Prakash as CEO.
Decentralized Systems Advocacy
- Aligned with the ethos of championing open and decentralized systems, mirroring the success trajectory of MosaicML, acquired for $1.3 billion by Databricks.
The Future for TogetherAI
- With a potential valuation trajectory mirroring MosaicML, Together AI could soar to a remarkable $650 million valuation.
In essence, TogetherAI's strategic positioning, economic advantages, and commitment to open-source innovation have made it a noteworthy player in the AI landscape, garnering attention from investors and the tech community alike.