Amnon Shashua has done it again. The CEO of Mobileye, founder of OrCam and the driving force behind Israel’s new digital bank has conquered Natural Language Processing (NLP) as well.
Shashua’s AI21 Labs said Wednesday that it released the world’s largest and most sophisticated language model, Jurassic-1 Jumbo, available to anyone interested in prototyping custom text-based AI applications.
Used correctly, the technology can read and understand text and learn to generate new text explaining it in multiple languages.
Jurassic-1 is offered on the company’s new NLP-as-a-Service developer platform, a website and API (application programming interface) where developers can build text-based applications like virtual assistants, chatbots, text simplification, content moderation, creative writing and many new products and services. Jurassic-1 is the first in a line of language models that the company is working on, to be followed by newer and even more sophisticated versions, the company said.
The system is being released as an open beta, meaning anyone can sign up and quickly experiment with language-based applications. Users will gain immediate access to Jurassic-1 Jumbo, which at 178 billion computational parameters, is slightly larger than OpenAI’s GPT-3, the company said.
Computer language models are grounded in NLP, a subfield of computer science aiming to build programs that can process and generate written natural language. However, producing such language models generally requires expensive computational resources and trained AI engineers. For these reasons language models are almost exclusively produced at big tech AI labs, out of the reach of a wider developer audience, AI21 said.
“You shouldn’t have to be an AI researcher working at a big tech company to do this stuff. Now anyone – publishers, students, artists, business people, researchers – can build language-based applications that rival those being dreamed up in big AI labs,” said the company’s co-founder and co-CEO Yoav Shoham.
AI21 Labs has already released one application that makes use of the company’s proprietary language models, called Wordtune, an AI writing companion app which helps users rephrase entire sentences.
The Tel Aviv-based start-up was co-founded by Shoham, a Stanford University AI professor, Ori Goshen, a serial entrepreneur and Shashua.