![]() After setting up The Archive house, which would become home to many early OpenAI researchers, the pair decided to use machine learning to solve a problem they’d experienced at now-defunct Ember: inspiring talented people who aren't looking for a job to apply for one anyway. Soon, Albrecht convinced Qiu to team up on Ember Hardware, his startup project building virtual reality hardware, but the company never got off the ground. They bonded over high-brow topics such as the future of humans’ decision-making powers in an AI-dominated world. Both had studied machine learning in college, Albrecht co-publishing papers at the University of Pittsburgh, Qiu working on probability theory while building and running high-frequency trade algorithms to help pay her way through MIT. Albrecht had been a cofounder and chief technology officer at several startups before joining the data team at wealth manager Addepar. Qiu worked at Dropbox, where she started in business operations before becoming the first chief of staff to CEO Drew Houston. Imbue’s founders first met at a conference at UC Berkeley in 2014. “A truly personal computer that does things for you, and frees people up.” ![]() “We believe AI has the potential to thin the barrier between ideas and execution,” Qiu said. Imbue wants to do the same for generative AI. For Qiu, that goal is a lofty one: build for AI agents what the Xerox PARC lab was for the personal computer half a century ago.īack then, computers were expensive and byzantine to use, but PARC researchers had developed tools that made them accessible to non-technical people and those tools ultimately put PCs in our homes. But it’s a stakes-raising bet that puts much more scrutiny on what Imbue does next. In the frothy AI market, a startup raising hundreds of millions without any revenue isn’t unheard-of. (McCaleb tells Forbes that he is still looking for “venture-style” financial returns in the long run.) And its lead backer, McCaleb’s Astera, is an unusual source compared to the name-brand venture capital firms and Big Tech cloud providers that have swarmed other recent AI projects - in part, Qiu and Albrecht claim, because a non-profit can be more patient with their commercialization timeline. No demo of their agents is ready for public consumption yet, its founders said. The startup employs only about 20 people. Imbue is also breathtakingly early in its journey to be joining the billion-dollar-startup ranks. It released an open-source training environment for teaching such tools, called Avalon, last fall more prototypes and releases are coming, its founders said, in the months ahead. To build such agents, Imbue has amassed access to 10,000 of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs -about the same amount of compute, its founders claimed, that OpenAI used to train GPT-4. “We believe AI has the potential to thin the barrier between ideas and execution.” Agents “go off on their own and do stuff,” Qiu explained. Such self-sufficiency could be helpful in a wide range of situations, from biology research to travel planning and complex coding projects, according to Albrecht. ![]() Imbue’s agents would act more like a virtual research assistant that can crunch analysis, recommend follow-on experiments and even set them up, all unsupervised. Chatbots like ChatGPT receive a user’s query and generate a near-instant response. Imbue’s focus is an AI “agent”: a type of computing system that can simulate human decision-making to complete complex tasks. While OpenAI and rivals from Anthropic to Google battle to build massive AI foundation models like GPT-4, Qiu and Albrecht are charting a different course.
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