An AI mentor, robots, and a model that can 'brainstorm': This week in new AI launches
Each week, Quartz rounds up product launches, updates, and funding news from artificial intelligence-focused startups and companies.
Here’s what’s going on this week in the ever-evolving AI industry.
Workera’s AI mentor, Sage
Workera, an AI-powered platform used by businesses to measure workers’ skills, launched Sage, which it says is “the world’s first ever AI mentor for the enterprise.”
With Sage, individuals and organizations can get tailored responses based on their needs, goals, and skill levels. For example, learners can use the AI mentor for guidance and encouragement, while managers can use Sage to analyze talent and get recommendations for improving workforce development.
The Allen Institute for AI’s multimodal model, Molmo
The Allen Institute for AI launched a family of state-of-the-art multimodal models called Molmo. The Molmo family includes its “most open and powerful multimodal model today, and the most efficient model,” Ai2 said.
Molmo can “understand” a wide range of images, from recognizing everyday objects to reading complex charts and menus. The models can also “point to what they perceive” on screens, such as the visual and interactive features real-world users see.
According to Ai2, Molmo is “creative” and can “brainstorm” designs, and even tell jokes and stories.
Molmo’s training, fine-tuning, and other data is available as open models.
“Multimodal AI models are typically trained on billions of images. We have instead focused on using extremely high quality data but at a scale that is 1000 times smaller,” Ani Kembhavi, senior director of research at Ai2, said in a statement. “This has produced models that are as powerful as the best proprietary systems, but with fewer hallucinations and much faster to train, making our model far more accessible to the community.”
Boston Dynamics’ robot, Spot
Boston Dynamics (HYMTF) announced updates to its Spot robot and Orbit, the software used to manage the robot fleet.
Among Spot’s new capabilities are acoustic vibration sensing, allowing its operators to detect bearing failures early and avoid a breakdown, and visual semantic context that improves how it “sees.”
Harmonic raised a $75 million Series A funding round
Harmonic, an AI company developing mathematical superintelligence, announced that it raised a $75 million Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Index Ventures also had “significant participation” in the round, which led to a $325 million post-money valuation.
The company was founded in 2023 by Robinhood (HOOD) chief executive Vlad Tenev and Tudor Achim.
Mathematical Superintelligence, or MSI, is “AI with mathematical capabilities superior to that of humans,” according to Harmonic. MSI can solve the limitations of other AI systems, the company says, by using formal verification to eliminate hallucinations, and overcoming data walls with synthetic data.
Harmonic has a state-of-the-art mathematics model called Aristotle, which it says scored 90% on the leading formal mathematics benchmark, MiniF2F.
“We believe that mathematical superintelligence is the next frontier in AI,” Tenev said in a statement. “We’re excited to partner with Sequoia, Index, and many other great investors to accelerate the advent of AI models that are accurate and truth-seeking.”
