AI

Together lands $102.5M investment to grow its cloud for training generative AI

Comment

Cloud Computing Concept with Digital Cloud and IT Icons
Image Credits: ArtemisDiana / Getty Images

Generative AI companies continue to raise huge amounts of capital to fuel their commercial — and, in some cases, open source — ambitions.

See Together, a startup creating open source generative AI and AI model development infrastructure, which today announced that it closed a $102.5 million Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Nvidia and Emergence Capital. The tranche — over five times the size of the company’s previous round — will be put toward expanding Together’s cloud platform that lets developers build on open and custom AI models, co-founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash says.

“Startups and enterprises alike are looking to build a generative AI strategy for their business that is free from lock-in to a single vendor,” Prakash wrote in a blog post published on Together’s website this morning. “Open source AI provides a strong foundation for these applications with increasingly powerful generative models being released almost weekly … We believe generative AI is a platform technology, a new operating system for applications, and will have a long-range impact on human society. The AI ecosystem will consist of proprietary models and open models, and it’s incredibly important that this future has choice and options.”

Vipul co-founded Together, launched in June 2022, with Ce Zhang, Chris Re and Percy Liang. Prakash previously founded social media search platform Topsy, which was acquired in 2013 by Apple, where he later became a senior director.

With Together, Prakash, Zhang, Re and Liang aim to create open source models and services that help organizations incorporate AI into their applications. To that end, Together has built a cloud platform for running, training and fine-tuning models that the co-founders claim offers scalable compute at lower prices than the dominant vendors (e.g., Google Cloud, AWS, Azure).

As Together explains in a blog post: “We’re achieving and offering significant reductions in cost of interactive inference workloads on large models. We optimize down the stack, with thousands of GPUs located in multiple secure facilities, software for virtualization, scheduling and model optimizations that significantly bring down operating costs.”

At present, Together operates a cloud spanning datacenters in the U.S. and EU, including servers operated by partners Crusoe Cloud and Vultr, that delivers around 20 exaflops of compute in total — scaling in clusters from 16 GPUs to 2,048 GPUs. Customers include NexusFlow, Voyage AI and Cartesia, some of whom also leverage Together’s APIs for serving models.

Pika Labs, which coincidentally raised $55 million this week, also built a model — a text-to-video model — on Together’s GPU clusters. Pika’s recently trained new iterations of the model from scratch with the clusters, which it uses to run its models to generate millions of videos per month for its early access users.

“By creating custom infrastructure, we can offer significantly better economics,” Vipul continued. “The Together platform allows developers to quickly and easily integrate leading open source models or create their own models through pre-training or fine-tuning. Our customers choose to bring their generative AI workloads to Together owing to our industry-leading performance and reliability, while still having comfort that they own the result of their investment in AI and are always free to run their model on any platform.”

To complement the cloud service, Together offers what it calls Custom Models, a consulting offering that allows customers to bring their own data to the Together cloud platform and have Together’s team work to design, build and test a model.

Together also heavily invests in open source AI research. One of the company’s first projects, RedPajama, sought to foster a set of open source generative AI models including “chat” models along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Together’s also released a fine-tuned version of Meta’s Llama 2 text-generating model; GPT-JT, a fork of the open source text-analyzing model GPT-J-6B (from the open research group EleutherAI); and OpenChatKit, an attempt at a ChatGPT equivalent.

Companies — and investors — are hungry for generative AI of all sorts. According to IDC, generative AI investments will rise from $16 billion this year to a whopping $143 billion in 2027. Generative AI firms are monopolizing venture capital investments, having attracted about 40% of all startup rounds — $11.9 billion — in the first six months of 2023.

But generative AI is far from a sure bet. Stability AI, for example, once the darling of VC firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners, O’Shaughnessy Ventures and Coatue, is said to be exploring a sale as profits fail to materialize and the company’s financial position worsens.

More TechCrunch

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, Ask Photos

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we look at the drama around TabaPay deciding to not buy Synapse’s assets, as well as stocks dropping for a couple of fintechs, Monzo raising…

Inside TabaPay’s drama-filled decision to abandon its plans to buy Synapse’s assets

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and…

On Elon’s whim, X now treats ‘cisgender’ as a slur