Personalized AI startup River AI raises $1.1B from consortium backed by Nvidia, AMD
River AI Inc., a startup that helps enterprises customize open-source artificial intelligence models, has raised $1.1 billion in early-stage funding.
The company stated in today’s Series A funding announcement that it received the capital over two rounds. General Catalyst and AMP PBC were the lead investors. They were joined by Nvidia Corp., AMD Ventures, Y Combinator and Temasek.
River AI is led by Chief Executive Officer Igor Babuschkin. He earlier co-founded xAI Corp. and worked at DeepMind as a researcher. Babuschkin helped develop the Alphabet Inc. unit’s AlphaCode system, the first coding AI that demonstrated competitive performance in a programming contest.
River AI’s inaugural product is a cloud service called the River API. It enables developers to tailor open-source large language models to their requirements by putting them through additional training. According to the company, the service supports LLMs with 35 billion to 1 trillion parameters.
River API customizes open-source models using a method called LoRA, or low-rank adaptation.It works by extending the model being customized with a small number of additional artificial neurons. Those extra neurons equip the LLM with capabilities that it doesn’t possess out of the box.
The primary selling point of LoRA is its cost efficiency. The standard way to extend an LLM’s capabilities is to retrain it from scratch, which can be highly resource-intensive. LoRA only requires software teams to train the small number of additional neurons they added to the model.
River AI says that the River API enables users to customize a model in 15 to 20 minutes. Additionally, it automates time-consuming prerequisites such as configuring the infrastructure on which training is carried out. The company says that models customized using its service can be up to four times more cost-efficient than proprietary alternatives.
The River API is the first component of an expansive AI product suite River AI is currently developing. According to the company, the next addition will be a set of features designed to deliver “personalization and continual learning for agents.”
In a July blog post, Babuschkin wrote that the company’s long-term goal is to develop personal AI systems capable of adapting to user preferences. “It is yours, not rented, and you have real control over it,” he detailed. The executive also disclosed that the company’s engineering push is not focused solely on software.
A job posting indicates that River AI plans to develop a custom system-on-chip with an onboard machine learning accelerator. The company will produce the processor using “advanced foundry nodes.” River AI plans to offer a compiler that will automatically turn customer LLMs built using PyTorch, a popular AI framework, into a form that can run efficiently on its silicon.
Image: Unsplash
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