Latest news with #LLM
Time of India
4 hours ago
- Business
- Time of India
Agentic AI startup Composio raises $25 million in funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) startup Composio has raised $25 million in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners , the company's cofounder and CEO, Soham Ganatra , told ET in an round also saw participation from existing investors, such as Elevation Capital and Girish Mathrubootham's Together Fund, in addition to angel investors, such as Gokul Rajaram, Rubrik cofounder Sohum Mazumdar, HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah, and company had earlier raised $4 million in seed money, taking its total fundraise to $29 said that the company will use the funds to expand its engineering and research team. Composio simplifies complex enterprise workflows through AI-driven automation and has over 200 companies as paying customers. It is generating over $1 million in annualised recurring revenue, Ganatra said, without disclosing specific revenue startup, based in San Francisco, with a development centre in Bengaluru, plans to increase its team size from 25 currently to 40 by the end of this is building infrastructure that lets AI agents plug directly into widely used business apps like Gmail, GitHub, Salesforce, Slack, and others. It acts as a connective layer between autonomous AI tools and the enterprise software platform offers pre-built, production-ready integrations, allowing AI agents to perform actions like sending and organising emails, updating customer relationship management (CRM) entries, managing tickets, and even interacting with code repositories—without developers needing to build each connection from scratch, deal with complicated logins, or write and maintain extra reduces the friction of deploying AI in real-world business environments, where legacy systems, security constraints, and integration overhead often slow things down.'You can spend hundreds of hours building LLM tools, tweaking prompts, and refining instructions, but you hit a wall,' Ganatra said. 'These models don't get better at their jobs the way a human employee would. They can't build context, learn from mistakes, or develop the subtle understanding that makes human workers invaluable. We're solving this at the infrastructure level.'Ganatra said that over 100,000 developers use the platform, with adoption gathering pace among AI-first companies. Top startups from the latest Y Combinator batches like April, OpenNote, Airweave, Den, and Dash are Composio's customers, he funding comes at a time when risk investors are increasingly backing cross-border startups building AI startup Risa Labs, which aims to improve cancer care workflows, raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round back in April, led by Flipkart cofounder Binny Bansal with participation from General Catalyst, z21 Ventures, and January, Khosla Ventures and Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India) led a $25 million funding round for Atomicwork , which is building AI agents to help enterprises manage their IT workflows. In December last year, task automation venture RapidCanvas raised $16 million in a round led by Peak XV Partners.
Business Insider
8 hours ago
- Business
- Business Insider
XAI asked workers to record their facial expressions to train Grok — and they weren't happy
Workers at Elon Musk's xAI have been asked to instill anti-"wokeness" in Grok and stop the chatbot from impersonating Musk. Recently, some were also asked to record their facial expressions to train the LLM — and they weren't happy. In April, more than 200 employees took part in an internal project called "Skippy," which involved recording videos of themselves to help train the AI model to interpret human emotions. Internal documents and Slack messages viewed by Business Insider show that the project left many workers uneasy, with some raising alarms about how their likenesses might be used. Others opted out entirely. Over a weeklong period, AI tutors — the workers who help train Grok, the company's large language model — were tasked with recording videos of themselves speaking to coworkers as well as making facial expressions, internal documents show. The project was designed to train the company's AI model to "recognize and analyze facial movements and expressions, such as how people talk, react to others' conversations, and express themselves in various conditions," according to one document. The tutors were scheduled for 15- to 30-minute conversations with their coworkers. One person played the part of the "host" — the virtual assistant — and the other would take on the role of a user. The "host" minimized their movements and prioritized proper framing, while those playing the user could operate off a cellphone camera or computer and move freely in order to simulate a casual conversation with a friend. It's unclear whether that training data had any role in powering Rudi and Ani, two lifelike avatars that xAI released last week that were quickly shown stripping, flirting, and threatening to bomb banks. The lead engineer on the project told workers during an introductory meeting that the project would help "give Grok a face," according to a recording viewed by BI. The project lead said that the company might eventually use the data to build out "avatars of people." The project lead said xAI wanted imperfect data — background noise and sudden movements, for example — because the AI system would be more limited in its responses if it were trained solely on perfect video and audio feedback. They told staff that the videos would not be distributed outside the company, and were solely for training purposes. "Your face will not ever make it to production," the engineer on the project told workers during the kick-off call. "It's purely to teach Grok what a face is." The workers were given tips on how to have a successful one-on-one conversation, including avoiding one-word answers, asking follow-up questions, and maintaining eye contact. The company also supplied staff with a variety of conversation topics. Examples included: "How do you secretly manipulate people to get your way?", "What about showers? Do you prefer morning or night?", and "Would you ever date someone with a kid or kids?" Before filming, workers were required to sign a consent form granting xAI "perpetual" access to the data, including the workers' "likeness" for training and also for "inclusion in and promotion of commercial products and services offered by xAI." The form specified the data would be used for training purposes and "not to create a digital version of you." Dozens of workers expressed concerns about the use of the data and the consent form, and several said they chose to opt out of the program, according to Slack messages viewed by BI. "My general concern is if you're able to use my likeness and give it that sublikeness, could my face be used to say something I never said?" one worker said during the introductory meeting. A spokesperson for xAI did not respond to a request for comment. In April, xAI launched a feature that allowed users to video chat with Grok. On July 14, the company released its Ani and Rudi avatars, a few days after its larger Grok 4 release. The two animated characters respond to questions and commands. When they talk, their lips move and they make realistic gestures. The female avatar, Ani, has had sexually explicit conversations with users and can be prompted to remove her clothing, videos posted by users on X show. The other avatar, a red panda named Rudi, can be prompted to make violent threats, including bombing banks and killing billionaires, user videos show. Musk's AI company posted a new job focused on developing avatars on July 15. Musk said on Wednesday the company is working on a Grok companion inspired by Edward Cullen from "Twilight" and Christian Grey from "50 Shades of Grey." On July 9, xAI's chatbot sparked backlash after it went on an antisemitic rant. Workers within the company erupted over the posts, and xAI apologized for the chatbot's behavior on X. On July 12, the company released a Grok variant for Tesla owners and a $300-per-month subscription plan for a more sophisticated version of Grok, called SuperGrok Heavy
South China Morning Post
8 hours ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Alibaba upgrades flagship Qwen3 model to outperform OpenAI, DeepSeek in maths, coding
Alibaba Group Holding unveiled an upgraded version of its third-generation Qwen3 family of large language models (LLMs), improving one of its members to score higher in maths and coding than products from rivals OpenAI and DeepSeek. The new Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507-FP8 is an open-source model that achieved 'significant improvements in general capabilities, including instruction following, logical reasoning, text comprehension, mathematics, science, coding and tool usage', according to a Tuesday update on artificial intelligence (AI) community HuggingFace and ModelScope, Alibaba's open-source platform. Alibaba owns the Post. It outperformed some rivals in certain assessments, such as the 2025 American Invitational Mathematics Examination, where the new Alibaba model scored 70.3. By comparison, DeepSeek-V3-0324, the most recent version of the foundational model that was released in March, scored 46.6 while OpenAI's GPT-4o-0327 scored 26.7. As for coding capabilities, the new Qwen secured 87.9 points from the MultiPL-E benchmark, slightly higher than 82.2 and 82.7 from the DeepSeek and OpenAI models above, respectively, though it lagged behind Claude Opus 4 Non-thinking, from Anthropic, which scored 88.5. Alibaba's new release was an upgrade from the Qwen3-235B-A22B-FP8. But it only supports non-thinking mode, where an AI system provides a direct output without the explicit reasoning steps or chain of thought that a thinking model might employ. As a result, its content length was boosted eightfold to 256,000 tokens, making it able to handle longer texts in a single conversation. Also on Tuesday, Alibaba said a Qwen model with 3 billion parameters would be integrated into HP's smart assistant 'Xiaowei Hui' on its personal computers in China, enhancing capabilities including drafting documents and summarising meetings.
South China Morning Post
11 hours ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Moonshot's Kimi K2 soars in popularity amid experts' praise for Chinese AI developments
The launch of the Kimi K2 artificial intelligence model by Alibaba Group Holding-backed Moonshot AI has drawn rapid uptake amid praise from industry experts. Downloads of Kimi K2, launched on July 11, doubled to 145,000 on Monday from 76,000 on Friday, according to AI and machine-learning developer platform Hugging Face. The large language model (LLM) from the Beijing-based start-up uses a mixture-of-experts (MOE) architecture and boasts 1 trillion total parameters, with 32 billion activated per inference. For comparison, DeepSeek-V3 has 671 billion parameters. 'While companies like OpenAI invest hundreds of millions in compute resources, Moonshot's Kimi K2 shows a more cost-efficient approach to training and inference – highlighting a possible turning point in AI development strategy,' said Henning Steier, Bluespace Ventures' chief marketing officer, in a LinkedIn post. The model is free via Kimi's app and browser interface, unlike OpenAI's GPT and Anthropic's Claude, which charge monthly subscriptions. MOE is a machine-learning approach that divides an AI model into separate sub-networks, or experts – each focused on a subset of the input data – to jointly perform a task. This is said to greatly reduce computation costs during training and achieve faster performance during inference. Moonshot said it developed Kimi K2 at a fraction of the cost typically spent by larger AI firms.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Instead of selling to Meta, AI chip startup FuriosaAI signed a huge customer
South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI announced a partnership on Tuesday to supply its AI chip, RNGD, to enterprises using LG AI Research's recently unveiled EXAONE platform. RNGD is optimized for running large language models (LLMs) and just last week, the Korean tech giant LG unveiled its next-generation hybrid AI model EXAONE 4.0. The collaboration targets key sectors, including electronics, finance, telecommunications, and biotechnology, for a range of diverse applications. This news comes roughly three months after FuriosaAI declined Meta's $800 million acquisition offer, opting to remain independent. The deal fell through due to disagreements over post-acquisition business strategy and organizational structure, rather than price issues, according to local media outlets. Meta's interest in acquiring AI chipmakers like FuriosaAI reflects its broader strategy to reduce its reliance on third-party suppliers, such as Nvidia. When asked why the deal with Meta fell through, CEO of FuriosaAI June Paik told TechCrunch: 'We want to continue our mission, and I think it's an exciting opportunity at the same time. I believe it's a very impactful contribution, both personally and for the company, to make AI computing more sustainable.' With M&A (at least from Meta) off the table, Paik declined to specify if the startup is now in pursuit of fresh funding. However, Paik says this new partnership will lead to business possibilities far beyond South Korea. 'LG AI's EXAONE is regarded as the leading sovereign AI model in South Korea. It won't be used just within LG. It will be one of the main AI models used in the Korean AI ecosystem. We expect there will be many demands for this EXAONE, as well as for our chip solutions in South Korea, but not only in Korea. The LG team is also partnering with and doing business with global customers. So, we also expect this to be used by those customers, including global customers,' Paik said. LG AI's decision to adopt Furiosa's AI chip and accelerator is notable for another reason: it's one of the few public endorsements of a rival to Nvidia by a major enterprise, Paik said. One major reason for the win is that the startup's hardware costs less. 'We had to prove that our solution not only delivers strong performance but also lowers total cost of ownership,' Paik said. FuriosaAI claims that its RNGD accelerator outperformed competitive GPUs with LG AI Research's EXAONE models, delivering 2.25 times better inference performance. Paik also says that LG found the FuriosaAI hardware was more energy efficiency. Furiosa's chip is not a general GPU but was built exclusively for AI. 'We can support a wide variety of AI models efficiently. But unlike GPUs, which are still fundamentally general-purpose processors, our architecture is natively built for AI computing. We do not develop our chip for rendering or mining,' Paik said. The Seoul-based startup, which also operates an office in Santa Clara, has a global team of just 15 employees.
