One of these alternatives is Jurassic-1. Numbering some 178 billion parameters in its largest form, the LLM is the brainchild of AI21 Labs, a research start-up-turned-product and platform manager founded in 2017 with the goal of creating models specialising in language generation and comprehension. “We didn’t want to play a pure research game like DeepMind,” says Ori Goshen, AI21 Lab’s chief executive (though it, too, is flirting with the idea of its own superpowered chatbot.) “We admire DeepMind, we think they’re great. But we also wanted to bring real commercial value from the get-go.”
That same instinct is present at Cohere, another AI start-up based out of Toronto. Its latest model, explains its chief operating officer Martin Kon, powers classification, semantic search and content moderation across 160 languages. “That might not be exciting to consumers who enjoy generating poems about their cats or images of dogs in sushi houses, but we feel it’s certainly incredibly exciting to CEOs and executives of companies, organisations, and governments of all sizes everywhere in the world,” he says.