AI21 Labs looking to challenge OpenAI in language model race

AI21 Labs has announced that it has released Jurassic-2, a new customizable language model it claims is the world’s most advanced. It has also released five new APIs helping make it easier for businesses to build their own applications and services to scale. Similar to Jurassic-1, Jurassic-2 will be available through NLP-as-a-Service developer platform AI21 Studio and offered in three sizes - Large, Grande, and Jumbo.

“When we released Jurassic-1, we were the first company to offer open access to LLMs without any waiting list, allowing anyone to build textual generative AI apps,” said Ori Goshen, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of AI21 Labs. “The Jurassic-2 family of models represents the next leap forward and will enable developers and organizations to build text-based applications, faster, with a state-of-the-art performance at a fraction of the cost. For those who don’t need all the capabilities for Jurassic-2 but still want to integrate generative AI into their websites, we also have new task-specific APIs to make our language models easily available to businesses and their needs.”

Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, and Amnon Shashua

Jurassic-2 offers a more advanced baseline model and makes it one of the most advanced language models available on the market. Its features include advanced instruction following capabilities; supporting languages such as Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch; reduced latency and up to 30% faster response times compared to Jurassic-1; and the most up-to-date data available in the industry due to an update in mid-2022. In all, the company’s Jurassic-2 language model ranks second globally, beaten only by ChatGPT developer OpenAI with its Davinci models.

Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, Amnon Shashua

Alongside the release of Jurassic-2, AI21 Labs is also releasing five new APIs for commercial use that are offered individually and can be used for a variety of tasks. These include:

• Paraphrase - which can rewrite up to a full paragraph of text, matching the style to the exact need
• Summarize - which provides a full summary of long-form articles
• Text recommendations - which offer improvements to a given text, such as increasing or diversifying vocabulary
• Grammatical error correction - which checks grammar in written work
• Text segmentation - which splits long pieces of text into appropriate segments based on topics

AI21 Labs has three core products: AI21 Studio, helping companies build NLF-based apps and services; Wordtune, which is an AI-based writing companion; and Wordtune Read, an AI-based reading companion helping people read better with abstractive summaries of articles, reports, and PDFs. The company was founded in 2017 by Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen, and Amnon Shashua and most recently raised a $64 million Series B round. It has raised a total of $118.5 million.