Prime Highlights
- Asher Spector said a far more data-efficient model would be much easier to bring into the economy.
- The founders say their framework can build intelligent systems without using half the internet.
Key Facts
- Flapping Airplanes is a year-old AI startup focused on training large models with less data.
- Its valuation quadrupled from $1.5 billion at seed stage to a reported $6 billion.
Background
Flapping Airplanes, a year-old AI startup, has raised a $1 billion Series A round that reportedly values the company at $6 billion. The company announced the funding in October. Index and Lux co-led the round.
The raise comes nine months after the startup launched with a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia and Index. That round valued the company at $1.5 billion, so its valuation has now quadrupled. Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins joined the new round, and Valor, Atreides, A* and Nvidia are also investors.
Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector founded the company. Smith is a former founder and Thiel fellow who worked at Neuralink during college. Asher Spector pursued a statistics PhD at Stanford. Ben Spector studied computer science at Stanford and founded Prod while at MIT. Sequoia partner David Cahn, an investor in the company, described Prod as one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful talent incubators. He said the founders are building a young person’s AGI lab.
The startup aims to train large models with less data. The founders describe their work as the most complete megakernel framework, which can run training, inference and video games at once in a single program. They say it can overlap memory-heavy inference with compute-heavy training, so the chip rarely sits idle. They believe this approach can build intelligent systems without using half the internet.
Asher Spector said a model that is a million times more data efficient would be far easier to bring into the economy. The company will now use the fresh funds to hire and pursue that goal.