Humans&, a startup whose philosophy is that AI should empower humans rather than replace them, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a valuation of $4.48 billion, The New York Times reported. Investors in the round include chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, venture capital firm SV Angel, Google Ventures, and Laurene Powell Jobs’ company Emerson Collective.
The three-month-old company’s mega deal follows a trend of investors pouring money into startups founded by independents of major AI labs. Humans& founders include Andi Peng, a former human researcher who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training for Claude 3.5-4.5. Georges Halik, Google’s seventh employee who helped build the first advertising system. Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He, former xAI researchers who contributed to the development of the Grok chatbot. Noah Goodman, professor of psychology and computer science at Stanford University.
Humans&’s 20-plus employees also come from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2, and MIT, according to the company. The startup aims to use software to help people collaborate with each other. Think of it as an AI version of an instant messaging app. One of their goals is to use existing AI techniques to train AI in new ways, such as programming chatbots that request information from users and store it for later use.
Humans& wants to reimagine “how models are trained at scale and how people interact with AI” in order to build AI that acts as “deeper connective tissue that powers organizations and communities,” its webpage says. The company cited the need for innovation in “long-term and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding,” as well as a tightly integrated focus on both science and product development.
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