human&startup with a philosophy that AI should empower people rather than replace them, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a valuation of $4.48 billion, reports The New York Times. Investors in the round include chip maker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and VC firm SV Angel, Google Ventures and Laurene Powell Jobs’ firm Emerson Collective.
Megadeal for a three-month-old company follows the trend of investors spend money at startups founded by breakaways the main AI laboratory. The founders of Humans include Andi Peng, a former Anthropic researcher who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training Claude 3.5 through 4.5; Georges Harik, the seventh Google employee who helped build the first advertising system; Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He, two former xAI researchers who helped develop the Grok chatbot; and Noah Goodman, Stanford professor of psychology and computer science.
Humans&’ 20-odd employees also come from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2, and MIT, according to the company. This startup aims to use software to help people collaborate with one another – think of it as an AI version of an instant messaging app. One of the goals is to use existing AI techniques to train AI in new ways, such as programming chatbots to request information from users and store it for later use.
To build AI that becomes a “deeper connective tissue that strengthens organizations and communities,” Manungsa& hopes to rethink “how to train models at scale and how people interact with AI,” according to the company’s webpage. The startup calls for innovation in “learning, memory, and user understanding, long horizon and multi-agent,” as well as an integrated focus on science and product development.
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