Large-scale machine learning models are at the heart of headline-grabbing technologies like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Google’s LaMDA. They’re impressive, to be sure, capable of generating images and text convincing enough to pass for a human’s work. But developing the models took an enormous amount of time and compute power — not to mention cash. DALL-E 2 alone was trained on 256 GPUs for 2 weeks, which works out to a cost of around $130,000 if it were trained on Amazon Web Services instances, according to one estimate.
Smaller companies struggle to keep up, which is why many turn to “AI-as-a-service” vendors that handle the challenging work of creating models and charge for access to them through an API. One such vendor is AssemblyAI, which focuses specifically on speech-to-text and text analysis services.
AssemblyAI today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round led by Insight Partners with participation from Y Combinator and Accel. To date, AssemblyAI has raised $64 million, which founder and CEO Dylan Fox tells TechCrunch is being invested in growing the company’s rese …
