[HN Gopher] Together's $20M seed funding to build open-source AI...
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Together's $20M seed funding to build open-source AI and cloud
platform
Author : tim_sw
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-05-15 16:44 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.together.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.together.xyz)
| tikkun wrote:
| The homepage reads like PR speak to me.
|
| Does someone here know concretely what the product will likely
| be? Is it a replicate/modal/banana competitor, an
| OpenAI/Anthropic competitor, a Stability AI competitor, or
| something else
| simonw wrote:
| This is the company behind RedPajama, which is a VERY big deal.
|
| It's the most realistic open source attempt at recreating the
| Facebook LLaMA LLM, from scratch, in a way that supports
| commercial usage.
|
| They released their full 2.6TB training dataset last month, and
| it's significant:
| https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/17/redpajama-data/
|
| They've also started releasing new, commercially-usable openly
| licensed LLM models trained on that data. You can try one of
| those out here:
| https://huggingface.co/togethercomputer/RedPajama-INCITE-Ins...
| ericflo wrote:
| I would also check out their 3B model. I tested it on launch
| with LoRA fine-tuning and found it to be surprisingly capable
| despite its size. I think a lot of people are skipping past
| testing it because it only has 3B params.
|
| Edit: https://huggingface.co/togethercomputer/RedPajama-INCITE-
| Bas...
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Well, MPT-7B is also commercially usable and openly licensed:
| https://www.mosaicml.com/blog/mpt-7b
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah it's really promising. It's partially trained on that
| RedPajama data.
| Anil1331 wrote:
| How is it different from Stability AI and other platforms ?
| orra wrote:
| > Together's $20M seed funding to build open-source
|
| This is a huge contrast. Stability AI's bread and butter is
| proprietary, not open source. Together seem to have a track
| record of open sourcing both code and models.
|
| To be fair, Stability AI have open sourced StableLM, which is
| welcome. But overall Stability exaggerate and lie about their
| openness.
| dmix wrote:
| It doesn't sound like it's trying to build a single model, it
| wants to build a network/community of them. One of which is
| their own. Probably sharing/coordinating training resources and
| other support systems? The things that are usually out of
| financial/technical scope for most smaller OSS AI projects. I
| could see smaller companies with open models spending to be a
| part of that or other financially backed OSS projects.
|
| Maybe it's more hands-on than just a hosted service like
| huggingface? I don't really know the market, so just
| speculating.
| mtillman wrote:
| Different investors.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Stability AI is also no longer open. They seem to be
| commercializing SDXL and it's not open - "yet".
| starlust2 wrote:
| I've noticed a big trend by commercial entities claiming to be
| "Open Source" but actually charging for licenses. Just because
| your code is in a public repo on github doesn't mean it's open
| source. If it's not an open source license it's not open.
|
| This is especially true of AI projects.
| latchkey wrote:
| Vipul's razor... https://razor.sourceforge.net/
|
| He's well known for producing open source.
| timtom39 wrote:
| This is the org behind RedPajama. So, to date, they have been
| open.
| capableweb wrote:
| Since you mention it in connection to Together/RedPajama, are
| you saying that what they are publishing isn't actually open
| source? Most of the stuff I see them publish is licensed under
| Apache-2.0 which is a FOSS license, so I find it weird to
| mention it here.
| slashdev wrote:
| Open source is overrated, in my opinion. I'd rather a healthy
| commercial entity driving development and supporting it, with
| visible source that I can modify as a big plus.
|
| The whole OSI open source thing is nice, but it's not going to
| matter to me much either way. I'm more worried that the open
| source project is no longer maintained or unsupported or
| development is slow and it gets obsolete. Your values, and thus
| your opinion, may be different.
| pydry wrote:
| Big tech seem to _really_ dislike this model.
|
| E.g. the whole tantrum Amazon had over the Elastic Search
| relicensing or Google briefly banning SSPL from their code
| hosting platform.
| ushakov wrote:
| $20M for a seed round? What's their moat? How will they earn
| money?
| capableweb wrote:
| Their outlined "mission" seems to be:
|
| > to empower innovation and creativity by providing leading
| open-source generative AI models and a cloud platform that
| makes AI accessible to anyone, anywhere.
|
| Since it's generally hard to earn money on the first part, I'm
| guessing they expect to make money on the latter part, assuming
| "anyone, anywhere" meaning people that can do business with US
| entities + people who can afford their service.
| ushakov wrote:
| How is this different from let's say huggingface?
|
| IMO, this sounds more like an excuse to cash out the $20M
| check
| ryanschneider wrote:
| No mention of their alignment strategy, if any. I feel like
| alignment is even more important in open models since it'll be
| much easier to train a "but evil" version, right?
| [deleted]
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