Fastino trains AI fashions on low cost gaming GPUs and simply raised $17.5M led by Khosla

Tech giants prefer to boast about trillion-parameter AI fashions that require huge and costly GPU clusters. However Fastino is taking a distinct strategy.

The Palo Alto-based startup says it has invented a brand new sort of AI mannequin structure that’s deliberately small and task-specific. The fashions are so small they’re skilled with low-end gaming GPUs price lower than $100,000 in whole, Fastino says.

The strategy is attracting consideration. Fastino has secured $17.5 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures, famously OpenAI’s first enterprise investor, Fastino solely tells TechCrunch. 

This brings the startup’s whole funding to just about $25 million. It raised $7 million final November in a pre-seed spherical led by Microsoft’s VC arm M12 and Perception Companions.

“Our fashions are quicker, extra correct, and price a fraction to coach whereas outperforming flagship fashions on particular duties,” says Ash Lewis, Fastino’s CEO and co-founder.

Fastino has constructed a set of small fashions that it sells to enterprise prospects. Every mannequin focuses on a selected process an organization may want, like redacting delicate knowledge or summarizing company paperwork.

Fastino isn’t disclosing early metrics or customers but, however says its efficiency is wowing early customers. For instance, as a result of they’re so small, its fashions can ship a whole response in a single token, Lewis advised TechCrunch, displaying off the tech giving an in depth reply directly in milliseconds. 

It’s nonetheless a bit early to inform if Fastino’s strategy will catch on. The enterprise AI area is crowded, with corporations like Cohere and Databricks additionally touting AI that excels at sure duties. And the enterprise-focused SATA mannequin makers, together with Anthropic and Mistral, additionally supply small fashions. It’s additionally no secret that the way forward for generative AI for enterprise is possible in smaller, extra centered language fashions.

Time might inform, however an early vote of confidence from Khosla definitely doesn’t damage. For now, Fastino says it’s centered on constructing a cutting-edge AI workforce. It’s concentrating on researchers at prime AI labs who aren’t obsessive about constructing the largest mannequin or beating the benchmarks.

“Our hiring technique may be very a lot centered on researchers that possibly have a contrarian thought course of to how language fashions are being constructed proper now,” Lewis says.