Fastino, a new company headquartered in one of the Silicon Valleys (Palo Alto or Balboa), has disrupted the AI ecosystem. They were around $17.5 million in recent seed funding, with Khosla Ventures leading the round. This funding is a huge step for the relatively new company. Including this round, they’ve raised nearly $25 million in total, including a $7 million round last year from Microsoft’s venture capital arm, M12, and Insight Partners.
Specifically, Fastino has created a unique large language AI model architecture that is small by design – hyper-focused on a specific task. This new paradigm allows for the training of models even on low-end, consumer-grade gaming GPUs. You can acquire all of these GPUs for less than $100,000 total. The end product is a robust suite of AI models. They’re powerful enough to shoot complicated answers back in one single token and infinitesimal time.
Ash Lewis, Fastino’s CEO and co-founder underscores the efficiency of their approach and the effectiveness of their models.
“Our models are faster, more accurate, and cost a fraction to train while outperforming flagship models on specific tasks.” – Ash Lewis, Fastino’s CEO and co-founder.
Fastino’s vision is to be at the leading edge of generative AI technology and its applications to the enterprise world. The tech company behind the platform is building an all-star AI team. They are specifically looking for researchers who come to the modeling table with outside-the-box ways of building models.
“Our hiring strategy is very much focused on researchers that maybe have a contrarian thought process to how language models are being built right now.” – Ash Lewis.
Khosla Ventures, known for being OpenAI’s first venture investor, recognizes the potential of Fastino’s technology to reshape AI applications across various industries. Through its unique approach Fastino hopes to fundamentally improve the way that AI is developed and deployed.
The company’s announced strides come amid an intensifying rat race in the field of generative AI technology. Industry experts are closely monitoring Fastino’s progress, as its unique model architecture could represent a pivotal shift towards more efficient and effective AI solutions.
Charles Rollet, a senior reporter at TechCrunch, recently focused on highlighting the significance of Fastino’s innovations. He thinks that if they succeed, these innovations have the potential to recalibrate what performance standards mean in a project. His previous work as an investigative reporter has led to U.S. government sanctions against behemoth technology firms. All of this goes to show how critical and detailed journalism can shape the tech industry’s hands.
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