Contextual AI emerges from stealth with $20 million to pursue "specialized artificial intelligence"

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Contextual AI, a new enterprise-focused AI startup founded in Palo Alto by veterans of Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and Hugging Face, came out of hiding today and announced that it raised $20 million in a round led by Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), with participation from Lightspeed, Greycroft and a long list of other angel investors.

The company has a single goal: to develop what its co-founders Douwe Kiela and Amanpreet Singh refer to in a blog post as "ASI: Specialized Artificial Intelligence."

"Why waste settings, money, latency, and computation on a model that knows Shakespeare and quantum physics, when all it really should be doing is solving your business problem? " they write, before taking a public shot of the most popular and used LLM to date, OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Contextual AI founders Amanpreet Singh (L) and Douwe Kiela (R). Credit: Contextual AI.

The Opportunity Contextual AI Sees

The duo has recent high-level experience in the field of AI and large language models (LLM). Both previously worked at Meta Platforms' FAIR on developing systems to detect hate speech in memes and the sale of illicit goods on Facebook. At HuggingFace, they worked on LLMs.

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