Liquid AI Is Redesigning the Neural Network
Inspired by microscopic worms, Liquid AI’s founders developed a more adaptive, less energy-hungry kind of neural network. Now the MIT spin-off is revealing several new ultraefficient models.
Artificial intelligence might now be solving advanced math, performing complex reasoning, and even using personal computers, but today’s algorithms could still learn a thing or two from microscopic worms.
Liquid AI, a startup spun out of MIT, will today reveal several new AI models based on a novel type of “liquid” neural network that has the potential to be more efficient, less power-hungry, and more transparent than the ones that underpin everything from chatbots to image generators to facial recognition systems.
Liquid AI’s new models include one for detecting fraud in financial transactions, another for controlling self-driving cars, and a third for analyzing genetic data. The company touted the new models, which it is licensing to outside companies, at an event held at MIT today. The company has received funding from investors that include Samsung and Shopify, both of which are also testing its technology.
“We are scaling up,” says Ramin Hasani, cofounder and CEO of Liquid AI, who co-invented liquid networks as a graduate student at MIT. Hasani’s research drew inspiration from the C. elegans, a millimeter-long worm typically found in soil or rotting vegetation. The worm is one of the few creatures to have had its nervous system mapped in its entirety, and it is capable of remarkably complex behavior despite having just a few hundred neurons. “It was once just a science project, but this technology is fully commercialized and fully ready to bring value for enterprises,” Hasani says.
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What is Liquid.ai?
Liquid AI, an MIT spin-off, is a foundation model company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Our mission is to build capable and efficient general-purpose AI systems at every scale.
Our goal at Liquid is to build the most capable AI systems to solve problems at every scale, such that users can build, access, and control their AI solutions. This is to ensure that AI will get meaningfully, reliably and efficiently integrated at all enterprises. Long term, Liquid will create and deploy frontier-AI-powered solutions that are available to everyone.
Spun out of MIT CSAIL, four founders - Ramin Hasani, Mathias Lechner, Alexander Amini, and Daniela Rus, started Liquid AI to create a new generation of foundation models from first principles.
Liquid AI: A New Generation of AI Models from First Principles
We are thrilled to unveil Liquid AI – an MIT spinoff – to forge the future of AI with enterprise-grade foundation models that are capable, private, and reliable.
Today marks a pivotal moment for us at Liquid AI as we emerge from stealth mode, ready to announce our mission to build best-in-class, domain-specific, and general-purpose AI systems powered by Liquid foundation models.
Founded by a quartet of MIT computer science and artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) AI and machine learning scientists – Ramin Hasani, Mathias Lechner, Alexander Amini, and Daniela Rus – we are thrilled to unveil our vision and the strides we have made thus far.
At Liquid, we are developing a new generation of AI foundation models built from first principles – going beyond generative pre-trained Transformers (GPTs). Liquid AI models build on a framework that leads to causality, interpretability, and efficiency. Our models enable powerful applications with a profound commitment to environmental responsibility, significantly reducing the carbon footprint of foundational models.
We are thrilled to announce that we have raised $46.6M in seed capital, led by OSS capital and PagsGroup (the family office of Stephen Pagliuca).
Other investors include Breyer Capital, Tom Preston Werner (GitHub Co-founder), Naval Ravikant (AngelList & AirChat Co-founder), Safar Partners, ISAI Cap Venture (Capgemini’s VC Fund managed by ISAI), Tobias Lütke (Shopify Co-founder), David Siegel (Two Sigma), Chris Prucha (Notion Co-founder), Samsung next, David Blundin (Link Ventures), Bold Capital Partners (Peter Diamandis), Marc Casper (President & CEO of Thermo Fisher), Duke Capital Partners, Argean Capital Management, Latham & Watkins, Bob Young (Red Hat Co-founder) and Automattic.
“We invested in Liquid AI, because we felt this was the Dream Team of artificial intelligence. Their technology will greatly reduce the cost of AI for companies versus the current Transformer-based models and remains adaptable beyond training. It also allows for explainability as opposed to the black box of existing models. It’s a triple threat technology that can be used as a foundational model for functional applications and vertical markets as well.”
– Stephen Pagliuca (Chairman and CEO PagsGroup)
“Liquid’s approach to advancing the state-of-the-art in AI is grounded in the integration of fundamental truths across biology, physics, neuroscience, math, and computer science. We believe that trans-disciplinary approaches will unlock the greatest levels of acceleration towards the most efficient breakthroughs.”
– Joseph Jacks (Founder and General Partner at OSS Capital)