AI startup Nomic has successfully raised $17 million in a Series A funding round to further develop its open-source alternative to GPT-4, a popular language model. The investment, led by Coatue, values Nomic at approximately $100 million. Other participants included Contrary Capital, Betaworks Ventures, SV Angel, Story Ventures, Factorial Capital, and various angel investors.
Founded last year in New York, Nomic has already launched two products. The first is an open-source large language model called GPT4ALL, which is similar to ChatGPT. This model is free to download and can be run on small devices like laptops. The second product is Atlas, a tool that enables the visualization of unstructured datasets, which can be used to build other large language models.
Nomic emphasizes its commitment to open-source technology in a blog post, expressing concerns about the concentration of language models in the hands of only a few companies with significant access to compute resources. The startup believes that the lack of transparency in how these models work poses a risk of centralized power in generative AI. Its mission is to create a collaborative and open-source ecosystem that ensures accessibility and transparency through freely available code, datasets, documentation, and model weights.
By offering an alternative to proprietary models like GPT-4 and Bard, which require subscription payments, Nomic provides developers with powerful models specialized for their specific use cases. The startup aims to empower users to understand and control the data that goes into these systems.
With over 50,000 developers already utilizing its open-source AI models, Nomic has formed partnerships with MongoDB Inc. and Replit Inc. Today, it announced a new collaboration with Hugging Face Inc., the creator of the Hugging Face Hub, a platform hosting over 100,000 open-source machine learning models. The partnership will involve the joint creation and distribution of interactive data visualizations.
Nomic intends to allocate its new funding toward hiring for various positions across its team. Additionally, the startup plans to enhance its existing product suite.
By securing significant investment and expanding its partnerships, Nomic is positioned to advance its open-source alternative and promote broader accessibility and understanding in the field of generative AI.
