Exciting news! Contextual AI, a new enterprise-focused AI startup founded in Palo Alto by veterans of Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and Hugging Face, has just emerged from stealth and announced that it has raised $20 million in a seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), with participation from Lightspeed, Greycroft, and a long list of other angel investors.
The company has a unique focus: Developing what its co-founders Douwe Kiela and Amanpreet Singh refer to in a blog post as “‘ASI’ — artificial specialized intelligence.”
“Why waste parameters, money, latency, and compute on a model that knows Shakespeare and quantum physics, when all it should really do is solve your company’s problem?” they write, later taking a public shot at the most popular and widely used LLM to date, OpenAI‘s ChatGPT.
The opportunity Contextual AI sees
The duo has recent high-profile experience in the arena of AI and large language models (LLMs). Both previously worked at Meta Platforms’ FAIR on developing systems for detecting hate speech in memes and the sale of illicit goods on Facebook. At HuggingFace, they worked on LLMs.
Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen significant strides in recent years. For example, Contextual AI, a Swiss-based AI startup, has recently secured $20M in funding from leading venture capital firms to develop Artificial Specialized Intelligence (ASI).ASI brings together machine learning, AI, and deep learning to create specialized, contextual intelligence for use in a variety of domains. This funding will enable Contextual AI to continue to develop and deliver its ASI technology to global customers.
With the rise of the digital frontier, businesses are increasingly recognizing the value of AI-driven decisions and insights. However, AI is often limited by traditional “generalised” algorithms. These algorithms are inadequate for dealing with complex reasoning and understanding in the ‘real world’, which is becoming more dynamic all the time.
With the support and investments of venture capital firms, Contextual AI is setting out to tackle this issue. Through the use of custom algorithms and natural language processing, the company is engineering a new generation of AI technology that is better able to comprehend context and think in more human-like ways.
The potential applications of ASI are practically limitless. From powering robotics to enabling autonomous vehicles to providing real-time business intelligence, ASI could revolutionize many industries. Moreover, the technology can be applied to simplify customer engagement on digital and social media platforms, unlocking new opportunities for real-time customer intelligence.
Contextual AI’s technology provides the speed, accuracy, and scalability required in order to process large volumes of data quickly. In particular, the utilization of deep learning and neural networks has enabled the company to extract meaningful insights from data faster. This is increasingly important as the world’s data grows exponentially.
Contextual AI and its team of experts are looking to push the boundaries of AI through its latest development of ASI. With the investment of major venture capitalists, the company has secured the resources and know-how to create an AI technology that can truly specialize in a particular domain. In doing so, AI and machine learning can no longer be seen as the exclusive realms of large technology companies.
