AI21 Labs Makes Language AI Applications Accessible to Broader Audience

AI21 Labs, an AI company specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP), has released Jurassic-1 Jumbo, the world’s largest and most sophisticated language model, to anyone interested in prototyping custom text-based AI applications.

“You shouldn’t have to be an AI researcher working at a big tech company to do this stuff. Now anyone –publishers, students, artists, businesspeople, researchers –can build language-based applications that rival those being dreamed up in big AI labs.”

Jurassic-1™ is offered via AI21 Studio™, the company’s new NLP-as-a-Service developer platform, a website and API 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.

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Jurassic-1™ is being released inside AI21 Studio™ as an open beta, meaning anyone can sign up and quickly experiment with new and exciting language-based applications. Should developers then wish to go live with their applications and serve production-scale traffic, they can apply for access to custom models on a commercial basis. Unlike OpenAI’s GPT-3, this approach is open to everyone.

“AI21 Studio makes text-based AI accessible to businesses in the same way AWS did for cloud computing,” said Yoav Shoham, co-founder and co-CEO of AI21 Labs.

Language Models–systems that can ingest text and generate likely continuations–are grounded in NLP, a subfield of computer science aiming to build programs that can process and generate written natural language. However, training language models and deploying them into production generally requires expensive computational resources and highly sought-after AI engineers, and for these reasons language models are almost exclusively produced at big tech AI labs, out of the reach of a wider developer audience.

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“You shouldn’t have to be an AI researcher working at a big tech company to do this stuff. Now anyone –publishers, students, artists, businesspeople, researchers –can build language-based applications that rival those being dreamed up in big AI labs.”

Developers who sign up to the open beta gain immediate access to Jurassic-1 Jumbo, which at 178 billion computational parameters, is slightly larger than OpenAI’s GPT-3. AI21 Studio™ also allows developers to easily customize a private version of Jurassic-1 models, shortening time to production and lowering costs.

AI21 Labs aims to mitigate potential misuse of its language models by capping the amount of text that can be generated in the open beta. “We take misuse extremely seriously and have put measures in place to limit the potential harms that have plagued others,” Shoham, the co-CEO, said. To develop applications that will serve production-scale traffic, developers will need access to custom models that aren’t restricted by the open beta. When approval is granted —AI21 Labs manually reviews every custom model application— developers can increase their usage in a pay-as-you-go cloud services model. AI21 Labs handles the deployment, serving, and scaling of the custom models.

The Tel Aviv based startup was co-founded by Shoham, a Stanford University AI professor, Ori Goshen, a serial entrepreneur, and Amnon Shashua, computer science professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and CEO of Mobileye (acquired by Intel). AI21 Labs is advised by academic and industry luminaries, including Sebastian Thrun, Dan Jurafsky, Chris Ré, Dan Roth, Kevin Leyton-Brown, and Shai Shalev-Shwartz.

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.

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