An AI startup that aims to complement workers rather than replace them has raised $480 million in seed funding from some of the biggest names in technology, already garnering a valuation of $4.48 billion.
San Francisco-based Humans End launched just three months ago and, despite having about 20 employees, has received backing from Nvidia, Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos and Google Ventures.
The seed round was led by venture capital firm SV Angel and Humans co-founder Georges Harik, with other investors including Emerson Collective, Forerunner and S32.
At this stage, details on what Humans will offer are scant, although it is newly launched website The initiative was described as a “human-centered frontier laboratory.”
According to the website, “At its best, AI should serve as a deep connective tissue that strengthens organizations and communities.” However, this will require “rethinking everything” from how models are trained to how people interact with AI, the company acknowledged.
The Human End team tasked with carrying out the “reinvention” includes experts from Anthropic, XAI and Google and works with Eric Zelikman, the company’s chief executive. The potential of the employees and their noble aspirations seem to have aroused considerable interest.
Among the clues provided by Human as to how it will achieve its goal is a pledge to focus on “longer horizons and innovation in multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory and user understanding.”
Long-horizon tasks are typically complex activities that require an AI agent to focus on a long series of interactions with sustained reasoning and planning, beyond the capabilities of a simple question-answer bot.
Using multiagent reinforcement learning, Humans’ AI models will be able to work with other neural networks, with agents receiving feedback on how well they perform tasks. That feedback is then used to improve the output quality.
In short, humans’ technology will be trained to be more curious or interactive than they currently are, and as a result, collaboration and communication will improve. Zelikman told reuters: “The model will coordinate with people and other AI where appropriate, to allow people to do more and bring them closer together.”
Whether this is enough to support Human’s “human-centric” credentials and allay fears that AI is going to claim millions of jobs remains to be seen. But enterprises will soon get an idea of ​​what’s in store, with plans to release the first products later this year.
