December 18, 2023

Open Models

↯ One idea to spark your curiosity

Working with open models is the best way for both vendors and users to build a sustainable business around AI solutions. Open models can be finely adapted to solve many new core business problems, in all industry verticals—in ways unmatched by black-box models. The future will be made of many different specialised models, each adapted to specific tasks, compressed as much as possible, and connected to specific modalities.

In the open model paradigm, the developer has full control over the engine that powers their application. Model sizes and costs can be adapted to fit specific task difficulty, to put costs and latency under control. For enterprises, deploying open models on one’s infrastructure using well-packaged solutions simplifies dependencies and preserves data privacy.

Bringing open AI models to the frontier — Mistral AI

Funding

↯ Developer-friendly companies that announced new funding rounds

NodeKit, a tool that helps blockchain developers use rollups (a way to bundle transactions together for better performance at scale), raised $1.2m in pre-Seed funding.

Featureform, an open-source platform to help teams define, manage, and serve machine learning features, raised $5.5m in Seed funding.

Laredo Labs, a startup building AI-powered developer tools including Solver, an agent that completes repository-level tasks directly from natural instructions, raised $8.5m in Seed funding.

Chalk, a data platform for building large-scale machine learning and real-time models, raised $10m in Seed funding.

Dynamic, a full service authentication platform for web3 applications, raised $13.5m in Series A funding.

Andalusia Labs, a collection of technology companies building solutions for blockchain applications and digital assets, raised $48m in Series A funding.

Mistral AI, a France-based generative AI platform that competes with OpenAI, raised $415m in Series A funding.