Together, the startup, raises $20 million to promote open-source generative AI

Despite competition from giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, investors are not turning away from newcomers and emerging players. Together, a startup developing open-source generative AI, announced today that it has raised $20 million in a funding round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Factory, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Robot Ventures, Definition Capital, Susa Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, and SCB 10x. Several high-profile angel investors also participated, including Scott Banister, one of PayPal’s co-founders, and Jeff Hammerbacher, a founding employee of Cloudera.

An open ecosystem for generative AI

Together, launched in June 2022, is the result of the work of Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Re, and Percy Liang. Together, they aim to create open-source generative AI models and services that, according to them, “help organizations integrate AI into their production applications.” To do this, Together is building a cloud platform to run, train, and refine open-source models, offering scalable computing power at “significantly lower” prices than major providers (such as Google Cloud, AWS, Azure).

“We believe that generative models are a consequential technology for society and that open, decentralized alternatives to closed systems will be essential for enabling the best outcomes for AI and society.” – Vipul Ved Prakash

Indeed, established players are feeling the pressure. An internal Google memo leaked earlier this month suggests that the search giant and its competitors cannot compete with open-source AI initiatives in the long term. Moreover, OpenAI is reportedly preparing to publicly unveil its first open-source text generative AI model in response to a proliferation of open-source alternatives.

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Together’s projects and ambitions

One of Together’s early projects, RedPajama, aims to foster a set of open-source generative models, including “chat” models similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Other efforts by Together include GPT-JT, a fork of the open-source text generation model GPT-J-6B (released by research group EleutherAI), and OpenChatKit, an attempt to create a ChatGPT equivalent.

Together’s platform has not yet been launched in GA version, and some might argue that its efforts are somewhat redundant in the context of the overall AI landscape. However, Vipul Ved Prakash contends that Together brings greater transparency, better control, and improved privacy protection.

Together plans to increase its team size, growing from 24 to around 40 employees by the end of the year, and invest the remaining raised capital in research and development, infrastructure, and product development.