October 16, 2023

Transparency vs. Complexity

We are reaching a tipping point. As the number of applications built on top of foundation models explodes, our lack of understanding of how to build these systems will finally catch up. These models are extremely large, trained on data that developers building on top of them never get to see, and they learn emergent behaviors that are mostly unknown. These models represent single points of failure that will put all downstream applications at risk. The lack of progress in safe AI and AI reliability could prevent us from unlocking the economic opportunities offered by advances in the technology, and presents a new set of risks.

Safety is All you Need, Lakera

Funding

Komment, an AI-enabled platform that provides automated pipelines to comment and document code, raised $1m in pre-Seed funding.

Sotai, a company building tools for training interpretable machine learning models that are easier to understand and control than black-box models, raised $2m in Seed funding.

Propify, a unified API that helps engineers integrate with property management systems, raised $3m in Seed funding.

Anysphere, a startup building an AI-native development environment called Cursor, raised $8m in Seed funding.

Lakera, an API-based security platform that allows developers to defend LLM applications against prompt injections, data loss, harmful content, and more, raised $10m in Seed funding.

Alpaca, an API for stock and crypto trading, raised $15m in funding.

Modal, a cloud function platform that allows engineers to run large-scale workloads without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure, raised $16m in Series A funding.

TileDB, a universal storage engine that stores any kind of data (beyond tables) in a unified format, raised $34m in Series B funding.

Prophecy, a low-code tool for building data pipelines and transforming data, raised $35m in Series B funding.