Generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies are continuing to secure substantial funding to support their commercial endeavors, including open-source initiatives.
do Together, a startup dedicated to developing open-source generative AI and AI model development infrastructure, recently announced the successful closure of a $102.5 million Series A funding round. This funding was led by Kleiner Perkins, with contributions from Nvidia and Emergence Capital. The latest investment round, which is over five times larger than the company’s previous funding round, will be utilized to expand Together’s cloud platform. This platform enables developers to create applications using both open and customized AI models, with co-founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash expressing intentions to enhance the platform further.
In a blog post on Together’s website, Prakash highlighted the growing interest from startups and enterprises in establishing generative AI strategies that are not tied to a single vendor. He emphasized the significance of open-source AI in providing Fame,ing [ “ fostering applications the [ ” fostering a Pr V together, to’s-d it the co providing a [ do a [ the Pr Together the coing Pr co for a [ the coing Together the co pative tingama asing sc the coing Together the coing Together the co pative aring: more the aims. do a Together the provides Together the offers Together the [ the Red Together to pp the offers Together the offers Together the offers Together the offers Together the offers Together the [ the Red Together the Red Together the Red Together the offers Together the provides Together the provides Together the provides Together the has Together, a strong foundation for these applications with increasingly powerful generative models being released almost weekly. We believe generative AI is a platform technology, a new operating system for applications, and will have a long-range impact on human society. The AI ecosystem will consist of proprietary models and open models, and it’s incredibly important that this future has choice and options.
Vipul co-founded Together, launched in June 2022, with Ce Zhang, Chris Re, and Percy Liang. Prakash previously founded social media search platform Topsy, which was acquired in 2013 by Apple, where he later became a senior director.
With Together, Prakash, Zhang, Re, and Liang aim to create open-source models and services that help organizations incorporate AI into their applications. To that end, Together has built a cloud platform for running, training, and fine-tuning models that the co-founders claim offers scalable compute at lower prices than the dominant vendors (e.g., Google Cloud, AWS, Azure).
As Together explains in a blog post: “We’re achieving and offering significant reductions in the cost of interactive inference workloads on large models. We optimize down the stack, with thousands of GPUs located in multiple secure facilities, software for virtualization, scheduling, and model optimizations that significantly bring down operating costs.”
At present, Together operates a cloud spanning data centers in the U.S. and EU, including servers operated by partners Crusoe Cloud and Vultr, that delivers around 20 exaflops of compute in total — scaling in clusters from 16 GPUs to 2,048 GPUs. Customers include NexusFlow, Voyage AI, and Cartesia, some of whom also leverage Together’s model-serving APIs.
Pika Labs, which coincidentally raised $55 million this week, also built a model — a text-to-video model — on Together’s GPU clusters. Pika’s recently trained new iterations of the model from scratch with the clusters, which it uses to run its models to generate millions of videos per month for its early access users.
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The revised version of the text is as follows:
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies are continuing to secure substantial funding to support their commercial endeavors, including open-source initiatives. Together, a startup dedicated to developing open-source generative AI and AI model development infrastructure, recently announced the successful closure of a $102.5 million Series A funding round. This funding was led by Kleiner Perkins, with contributions from Nvidia and Emergence Capital. The latest investment round, which is over five times larger than the company’s previous funding round, will be utilized to expand Together’s cloud platform. This platform enables developers to create applications using both open and customized AI models, with co-founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash expressing intentions to enhance the platform further.
In a blog post on Together’s website, Prakash highlighted the growing interest from startups and enterprises in establishing generative AI strategies that are not tied to a single vendor. He emphasized the significance of open-source AI in providing a strong foundation for applications, with increasingly powerful generative models being released almost weekly. Prakash believes that generative AI is a platform technology, a new operating system for applications, with the potential for a long-range impact on human society. He envisions an AI ecosystem consisting of both proprietary and open models, emphasizing the importance of choice and options in this evolving landscape.
Vipul co-founded Together in June 2022, along with Ce Zhang, Chris Re, and Percy Liang. Prakash’s previous experience includes founding the social media search platform Topsy, which was acquired by Apple in 2013. With Together, Prakash, Zhang, Re, and Liang aim to create open-source models and services that facilitate the integration of AI into various applications. The company has developed a cloud platform for running, training a training and fine-tuning models, offering scalable compute at lower costs compared to dominant vendors such as Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure.
Together’s cloud infrastructure spans data centers in the U.S. and EU, including servers operated by partners Crusoe Cloud and Vultr, providing approximately 20 exaflops of compute in total. The platform scales in clusters from 16 GPUs to 2,048 GPUs, serving customers like NexusFlow, Voyage AI, and Cartesia, who leverage Together’s model-serving APIs. Pika Labs, another company that raised $55 million recently, utilized Together’s GPU clusters to build a text-to-video model. By leveraging Together’s custom infrastructure, Pika Labs achieved better economics on pre-training and inference workloads, enabling the generation of millions of videos per month for its early access users.
Together also invests heavily in AI research, with projects like RedPajama focusing on open-source generative AI models, including chat models similar to Open’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company has released versions of Meta’s Llama 2 text-generating model, GPT-JT, and OpenChatKit, aiming to provide alternatives to existing models.
The revised text aims to provide a comprehensive overview of Together’s initiatives, highlighting its focus on developing open-source open-source models and services, enhancing the accessibility of AI technology, and fostering innovation in the field.
