Together AI

Together AI is a company making waves in the artificial intelligence world by focusing on open-source AI and providing powerful computing infrastructure. Founded in 2022 by a team including Vipul Ved Prakash as CEO and Ce Zhang as a co-founder, Together AI is based in Menlo Park, California, a hub for tech innovation. Their mission is to democratize AI, meaning they want to make advanced AI tools and capabilities available to everyone, not just a few large corporations with vast resources.

One of Together AI's main offerings is "Together Compute," a cloud platform designed for running and fine-tuning a wide array of AI models, particularly large language models. This platform allows developers and researchers to access powerful Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs. GPUs are specialized computer chips essential for the intensive calculations AI models require. By providing this access, Together AI enables users to perform "inference," which is using a trained model to make predictions, and "fine-tuning," which is adapting an existing model for a specific task, both efficiently and often at a lower cost than some alternatives.

Beyond their compute platform, Together AI is a significant contributor to the open-source AI community. They have developed and released their own open-source large language models, like the RedPajama family, which are trained on publicly available datasets. They also support research into new architectures and methods for training AI models more efficiently. Their contributions help foster innovation and provide alternatives to proprietary models, giving developers more choices and transparency in how AI is built and used.

Together AI matters because they are challenging the status quo in the AI industry. While many companies develop and keep their most powerful AI models private, Together AI champions the idea of open AI, where models, data, and research are shared openly. This approach can accelerate innovation, make AI more auditable, and ensure a broader group of people can shape the future of artificial intelligence. They are a key player in making high-performance AI accessible and fostering a vibrant open-source ecosystem.