If you aren't a native English speaker, yet it’s the main language used at your place of work (which is often the case in the high-tech world) there’s a high chance you use Wordtune, a plugin that helps to rephrase, shorten or lengthen sentences. Wordtune is a strictly Israeli plugin, developed by AI21 Labs, the AI and language startup founded by three serial entrepreneurs– one of whom is Amnon Shashua.
Today (Tuesday), AI21 Labs announces it has raised $64 million and is valued at $664 million. The fundraising was led by Ahren Innovation Capital and included participation from Pitango Venture Capital, TPY Capital, Walden, Mark Leslie, and Professor Amnon Shashua himself, who continues to give funds to his companies.
NLP-as-a-Service
AI21 Labs has turned NLP into a service; it develops language products and models based on natural language processing. Wordtune is perhaps their best-known product, but it has launched several other cool projects in the past, like a language model tool that can convert a bullet list into an orderly text.
On top of those endeavours, the company launched AI21 Studio, a development platform connected to its language model, Jurassic-1, which competes with GPT-3, a tool that has become almost synonymous with language models. The company's model is based on 178 billion computational parameters, and through the platform, you can build chatbots, and content filtering tools, convert text to a table or code from Python to JavaScript, and builds an extension to complete your code. After launching AI21 Labs, the company has also developed Jurassic-X, an MRKL (Modular Reasoning, Knowledge and Language) system which is based on the same parameters as Wordtune but can also make calls to renewable external databases, and can therefore answer queries more accurately and correctly. According to the company, the models of voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are much smaller and limited in their capabilities compared to Jurassic-X.
Investors are enthusiastic
In a conversation with Geektime, Yoav Shoham, CEO and co-founder of AI21 Labs, said that in 2021 the company had several hundred thousand users, but today it has several million. The company emphasizes that it managed to raise an impressive amount during a challenging market period, and when I asked Shoham how they were able to still convince investors to proceed, he said, “The current data on the growth rate of users and revenues excites us– and it turns out it excited investors too.”, According to Shoham, they plan to launch more products in the near future, so we will wait patiently to hear from them again soon.
