Three-month-old AI startup Humans& raised $480 million in a seed funding round from investors including Nvidia, Google Ventures and Jeff Bezos, according to reporting by the The New York Times. The company, which was founded by former Anthropic, xAI and Google researchers, is already valued at $4.48 billion.
The company’s goal is to develop an AI solution that will strengthen human contribution in the workforce, rather than replace it outright. Humans&’s software is expected to improve collaboration between people, augmented with AI assistance for internet searches and similar tasks, the Times article mentioned.
Humans& wants to expand upon current neural network capabilities. These networks allow AI systems to glean patterns from human-created content and generate comparable outputs. The company will train its systems to be more interactive, enabling it to ask users questions and store their responses. The lofty cost of using existing AI techniques to train automated models in new ways is the driving factor behind the company’s sizeable capital raise.