What is AI21 Labs?

The AI Labs Landscape

Hey Everyone,

There’s a lot of competition in AI Labs. Although it may not always seem that way to us. When Google acquired DeepMind all those years ago it changed how BigTech operates with affiliated or stealth AI Labs.

Artificial intelligence researchers don’t like it when you ask them to name the top AI labs in the world, possibly because it’s so hard to answer. Just like BigTech influences the “open-source” communities of developers around software languages, they do the same with AI Labs.

OpenAI when it started was supposed to be non-profit. Fast forward a few years and that was no longer the case with a $1 Billion “investment” from Microsoft. U.S. Big Tech — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft — have all set up dedicated AI labs over the last decade. Then there are Chinese ones, and ones in stealth we haven’t even heard about yet.

AI Labs do research and specifically push forward projects such as we have witnessed with OpenAI, causing other labs to build on their implementations. R & D (Research and Development) are the leading fields where AI jumps in with its extraordinary potential. AI Startups have already formed around both GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, for example.

Let’s name a few AI Labs in no particular order:

• DeepMind

• Alpeh Alpha

• OpenAI

• AI21

• Google Brain

• AI4Science

• J.P. Morgan’s AI Research

• EleutherAI

• Meta AI

• Microsoft Research

• The Machine Learning Research Group at the University of Oxford

• ElkanIO Research Labs

• The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL)

• Carnegie Mellon University AI

• Baidu AI Research Lab

• Tencent AI Lab

• AltaML

• Alan Turing Institute, London

• UCLA Samueli School of Engineering

• Brain AI Lab (South Korea)

• IBM Research

• Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI)

• CIM (Center for Intelligent Machines) - McGill University in Canada

• UTCS AI-Lab - University of Texas

• MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

• Salesforce AI Lab

So as you can see they are a mix of BigTech labs, University labs and startups, among other kinds of arrangements. There are literally hundreds of these organizations.

AI Labs in an age of Public Relations Hype

BigTech in particular see fit to boost AI Labs with media and hype. The corporate games on an algorithmic internet they themselves control with added advertising budgets. It’s sad really what becomes of AI Labs and the PR hype that they succumb to:

Smerity @Smerity

What is OpenAI? I don't know anymore. A non-profit that leveraged good will whilst silently giving out equity for years prepping a shift to for-profit that is now seeking to license closed tech through a third party by segmenting tech under a banner of pre/post "AGI" technology?

Tom Simonite @tsimonite

Most interesting bit of the OpenAI announcement: "we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner." Commercializing sub-human AI was previously described as an option “If the timeline is longer” https://t.co/8qMoXaXjBW

AI has been hailed as a technology that has the potential to bring about a new industrial revolution and dramatically change the world we live in, however the PR vs. the reality are two very different things. Google’s DeepMind may have a higher budget for PR, but more obscure AI Labs or startups like Hugging Face and others may be doing more interesting things.

In particular, DeepMind, OpenAI, and FAIR (now Meta AI) are widely perceived as the top three labs partly due to “strong PR games”. What day I’ll rank all the AI Labs I can find in a coherent way. Microsoft also pushes a lot of PR, especially after its acquisition of LinkedIn. It’s hard to uncover facts and impactful research, on such an internet.

Let’s go into a bit more detail about AI21 Lab specifically now.