DeepMind Alumni Draw Investors Beyond Large Language Models
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One of the researchers behind AlphaGo is seeking tens of millions of dollars from a small initial group of backers for a new startup called Metis Reasoning, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Sept. 24). AlphaGo is the Google DeepMind program that beat a world champion at the board game Go in 2016 by learning from millions of […] The post DeepMind Alumni Draw Investors Beyond Large Language Models appeared first on PYMNTS.com .
One of the researchers behind AlphaGo is seeking tens of millions of dollars from a small initial group of backers for a new startup called Metis Reasoning, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Sept. 24). AlphaGo is the Google DeepMind program that beat a world champion at the board game Go in 2016 by learning from millions of games against itself and planning moves ahead. Thore Graepel left Alphabet’s research lab this summer, and the talks are preliminary, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
Metis Reasoning is working on artificial intelligence that can respond to unfamiliar problems and choose an action, with uses in robotics, science and engineering, according to its website as cited by Bloomberg. Graepel’s personal site github describes the project as bringing AlphaGo-style reasoning to frontier AI so machines can plan and act under uncertainty.
A large language model predicts the next word from human-written text. The systems Metis Reasoning and its peers are chasing learn from their own actions and weigh what to do before doing it, according to the report.
David Silver, who led DeepMind’s reinforcement learning team, raised $1.1 billion at a $5.1 billion valuation in April for Ineffable Intelligence, TechCrunch reported . Reinforcement learning is a method in which AI improves through trial and error rather than by studying human examples. Sequoia and Lightspeed co-led the round, with Nvidia and Google among the participants, CNBC noted .
LeCun’s AMI Labs raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation in March to build world models, according to TechCrunch. A world model predicts how an environment will respond to an action, letting a robot compare options before it moves, according to an Aug. 14 the World Economic Forum article .
Emulate, founded in August by three DeepMind veterans, is in talks to raise up to $700 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, PYMNTS reported last week. It is the third lab to spin out of DeepMind’s London offices this year with hundreds of millions in financing.
Tranched rounds, in which capital is raised in steps, are spreading among AI startups, according to Bloomberg. New labs want a high valuation to signal confidence and pull in talent. Splitting the round lets early backers buy in at a lower price before later investors come in higher.
Metis Reasoning could raise a further tranche of hundreds of millions of dollars at a higher valuation, the people told Bloomberg, and the structure and size of the funding could still change.
The post DeepMind Alumni Draw Investors Beyond Large Language Models appeared first on PYMNTS.com .