Together.xyz – Google Domains customer – (United States)
AI-powered solutions are establishing their online presence on .xyz domains. Dashboard builder Sloped.xyz leverages AI to make chart building easier for non-technical team members. Tech startup Spice.xyz is aimed at harnessing AI technology to make it easy to access and leverage web3 data. Software company Iluma.xyz is developing AI-powered solutions aimed at helping teams find revenue-generating opportunities. In this week’s #AIMonday, we’ll introduce you to a San Francisco-based startup aimed at revolutionizing the field of generative AI: Together.xyz.
Together.xyz is the online home of Together, a tech startup based in San Francisco, California, founded in 2022 by experienced engineers and scientists. They specialize in developing open source generative AI tools and resources, aiming to make generative AI more accessible. Generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence that can generate art, music, compositions, and various other forms of creative output. Together’s technology utilizes the latest advancements in generative AI, such as transformer models and diffusion models, enabling users to easily build and train their own AI models. On May 15, 2023, Together announced they had raised $20 million in a seed round led by venture capital firm Lux Capital.1
The founders of Together believe that open and decentralized alternatives to closed systems may end up being critical for society.2 In an era where AI systems vary in openness, Together aims to distinguish itself by emphasizing openness, privacy, and transparency. By leveraging open-source generative models, Together aims to provide organizations with the tools to inspect, customize, and understand the models they use. This approach is particularly attractive to regulated enterprises, as open source models trained on open data sets offer enhanced control and the ability to align the models with their specific applications.
As founder Vipul Ved Prakash explained in the press, “As enterprises define their generative AI strategies, they’re looking for privacy, transparency, customization and ease of deployment. Current cloud offerings, with closed-source models and data, do not meet their requirements.” Together seeks to offer a cloud platform specifically designed for running, training, and fine-tuning open-source models. This platform offers scalability and accessibility, along with competitive pricing, which can contribute to making the adoption of generative AI more accessible and inclusive for businesses.
Together’s collaboration with esteemed organizations such as MILA Québec AI Institute, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM), and ETH’s data science lab, DS3Lab, has resulted in notable projects. Their work on RedPajama, a set of open-source generative models, aims to rival AI research lab OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform. By fostering collaboration and leveraging the Together Decentralized Cloud, the startup embraces a community-driven approach, pooling resources and expertise to drive innovation in the field of generative AI.
The startup understands that training and using big AI models can require a lot of energy. This energy use contributes to carbon emissions, which are harmful to the environment. In an effort to tackle this problem, Together partnered with Crusoe, a company that finds new ways to use wasted energy from oil production. Crusoe’s technology takes this wasted energy and uses it to power the computers in the Together Decentralized Cloud. This is designed to reduce carbon emissions and methane emissions, which are harmful to the planet. Together and Crusoe are collaborating to build an open ecosystem for AI that also cares for the environment.
Together boasts a team of accomplished founders, including Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Re, and Percy Liang, each with distinguished backgrounds in AI and related disciplines. CEO Vipul Ved Prakash brings experience as a former senior director at Apple. CTO Ce Zhang is an associate professor at ETH Zürich, a renowned science and technology-focused university. Percy Liang is an associate professor at Stanford. Chris Ré is also an associate professor at Stanford and previously co-founded Snorkel AI, a data-centric AI platform developer. We are inspired by Together’s objective to build an open ecosystem that empowers individuals and enterprises to seamlessly incorporate AI into their applications. You can learn more by following the startup on Twitter and LinkedIn, and by visiting Together.xyz.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/15/together-raises-20m-to-build-open-source-generative-ai-models/
2. https://www.together.xyz/blog/seed-funding
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