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A startup known as Letta has simply emerged from stealth with tech that helps AI fashions bear in mind customers and conversations. Created in UC Berkeley’s famed labs startup manufacturing unit, it additionally introduced $10 million in seed cash led by Felicis’ Astasia Myers, at a $70 million post-money valuation.
Letta can be backed by a who’s who of angel traders in AI, like Google’s Jeff Dean, Hugging Face’s Clem Delangue, Runway’s Cristóbal Valenzuela, and Anyscale’s Robert Nishihara, amongst others.
Based by Berkeley PhD college students Sarah Wooders and Charles Packer, this can be a extremely anticipated AI startup launch. That’s as a result of it’s a baby of Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab and is the industrial entity of the favored MemGPT open supply challenge.
Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, led by acclaimed professor and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica, is the descendent of RISELab and AMPLab, which spawned such corporations as Anyscale, Databricks, and SiFive. Sky Lab, particularly, birthed quite a few in style open supply giant language mannequin (LLM) tasks just like the Gorilla LLM, vLLM, and the LLM structured language SGLang.
“A ton of tasks in a short time, inside a 12 months’s timeframe, got here out of the lab. Simply folks sitting subsequent to us,” described Wooders. “So it was type of an unbelievable time.”
MemGPT is one such challenge and is such a scorching commodity that it really went viral earlier than it even launched.
“Somebody scooped us,” Packer instructed TechCrunch. The founders had posted a whitepaper on Thursday, October 12, 2023, and deliberate to launch a extra in-depth paper and the code to GitHub the next Monday. Some random individual discovered the paper, posted it to Hacker Information on Sunday, and it “went viral on Hacker Information earlier than we had an opportunity to correctly launch the code, launch the paper, or, like, do a tweet thread or something like that,” he stated.
The explanation for the thrill was that MemGPT mitigates a pernicious downside for LLMs: Of their native type, fashions like ChatGPT are stateless, which means they don’t retailer historic knowledge in long-term reminiscence. That is problematic for AI apps that rely upon attending to know and study from a consumer over time — all the things from buyer assist bots to healthcare symptom-tracking apps. MemGPT manages knowledge and reminiscence in order that AI brokers and chatbots can bear in mind earlier customers and conversations.
The publish on the paper stayed atop Hacker Information, the favored web site for programmers run by Y Combinator, for 48 hours, Packer recounted. So he spent his weekend and the subsequent few days answering questions on the location whereas making an attempt to get the code able to be launched. As soon as the challenge was obtainable on GitHub, a hyperlink to it went viral on Hacker Information, once more. YouTube interviews and tutorials, Medium posts, 11,000 stars and 1.2K forks on GitHub occurred shortly.
VC Felicis’ Myers found Wooders and Packer by studying about MemGPT, too, and instantly acknowledged the tech’s industrial potentialities.
“I noticed the paper when it was launched,” she instructed TechCrunch, and she or he promptly reached out to the founders. “We had an funding theme round AI agent infrastructure and appreciated {that a} actually vital part of that was the info and reminiscence administration to make these conversational chat bots and AI brokers efficient.”
The founders nonetheless nearly traipsed round Sand Hill Street doing Zoom calls with VCs earlier than going with the one which cherished them first.
In the meantime, Stoica brokered introductions to Dean, Nishihara and different big-name Silicon Valley angels. “Quite a lot of the professors at Berkeley, simply as a consequence of being at Berkeley, are very properly related,” Packer recalled about how straightforward the angel investor course of was. “They’ve their eye on tasks out of this lab which might be going to be commercialized.”
Competitors and the specter of OpenAI o1
Whereas MemGPT is already out within the wild and getting used, Letta’s industrial variant, Letta Cloud, just isn’t but open for enterprise. As of Monday, Letta is accepting requests for beta customers. It’s going to provide a hosted agent service that enables builders to deploy and run stateful brokers within the cloud, accessible by way of REST APIs, a programming interface that may preserve state. Letta Cloud will retailer the long-term knowledge obligatory to take action. Letta may even provide developer instruments for constructing AI brokers.
With MemGPT, Wooders sees a big span of makes use of. “I believe the primary use case that we see is mainly, extremely personalised, very partaking chatbots,” she says. However there are additionally cutting-edge makes use of like “a chatbot for most cancers sufferers” the place sufferers add their historical past after which share ongoing signs so the bot can study and provide steerage over time.
Price noting that MemGPT isn’t alone in engaged on this. LangChain might be its finest recognized competitor, and it already presents industrial choices. The most important mannequin makers additionally provide AI agent-making instruments as properly, like OpenAI’s Assistants API.
And OpenAI’s new o1 mannequin could make the necessity to repair state a moot level for its customers. As it’s a multistep mannequin, it basically should preserve state to a point with the intention to “assume” and reality verify earlier than it replies.
However Wooders, Packer, and Myers see just a few key variations to what Letta is providing versus what 800-pound market gorilla OpenAI is doing. Letta claims it can work with any AI mannequin and expects its customers to make use of lots of them: OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, their very own homegrown fashions. OpenAI’s tech at present solely works with itself.
Extra importantly, Letta is utilizing open supply MemGPT and leaping firmly into the open supply facet of the FOSS vs. black field LLM debate, saying open supply is a better option for AI utility programmers.
“We’re positioning ourselves because the open different to OpenAI,” Packer says. “I believe it’s really very, very laborious to construct superb AI purposes, particularly while you care about, like hallucination, for those who can’t see what’s happening below the hood.”
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