San Francisco-based AI startup Writer Tuesday put out a new large artificial intelligence model, which should position the company as a competitor with industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic. This one, the company said in a release, cost around $700,000 to train considerably less than the million competitors regularly spend.
The writer is currently in a funding round, raising up to $200 million and taking the valuation up to $1.9 billion, nearly quadrupling its valuation from September 2023 to more than half a billion dollars after raising $100 million. Such increased investors’ interest reflects the company’s innovative approach toward AI training.
One of the main things Writer uses is synthetic data, which is artificial information mimicking real life but with people’s identities hidden. Synthetic data is becoming more popular in AI for this reason alone; otherwise, raw public data can be tapped out. A report published last month showed publicly available training data may be depleted between 2026 and 2032 if the present trend continues, and alternative sources need to be tapped into.
Companies like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are investing in Open AI using synthetic data for training AI. Some experts, however, suspect that poor use of synthetic data degrades the performance of models as well as gives strength to already existing biases. Co-founder and CTO at Writer Waseem Alshikh elaborated on how his company trains its models: “We don’t train our models on any fake or hallucination data , we use real, factual data and convert it into a structured, clearer format for model training.”
Corporate clients will be able to produce coherent text, and analyze or summarize information by using writer’s generative AI technology to develop customized AI applications. The company serves over 250 enterprise clients, such as Accenture, Uber, Salesforce, L’Oreal, Vanguard, etc., in sectors like IT, operations, sales, and marketing.
Given the generative AI market is expected to bring in more than $1 trillion within the next decade, Writer’s new style remains at the vanguard of a swift-changing movement. Already this year in 2024, investors poured in $26.8 billion into 498 generative AI deals, as sector funding in 2023 skyrocketed more than 200% above 2022.
