The company's co-founder, Yoav Shoham, stated that AI21 Labs has always targeted enterprise businesses and has focused on creating robust and reliable systems. Shoham also noted that while the company has lost some deals to OpenAI, it rarely loses to open-source models. Looking ahead, AI21 Labs plans to manage increased scale, expand geographically, and continue to innovate in the technology side, with Shoham predicting a shift in focus from language models to AI systems in the next two years.
Key takeaways:
- AI21 Labs, known for its AI-based writing companion Wordtune, has raised $155 million in a funding round with participation from Nvidia and Google.
- The company boasts some of the world's most sophisticated large language models (LLMs), including its Jurassic-2 family of models, which powers AI21 Studio and Wordtune.
- Despite the success of Wordtune, AI21 Labs has been flying under the radar, similar to Cohere, but plans to increase its brand presence and compete with OpenAI for enterprise business investment.
- Co-founder Yoav Shoham believes that while open source models offer a sense of comfort, proprietary models like those of AI21 Labs, OpenAI, and Anthropic often provide superior performance.