Anthropic Employees Leave to Start a Business, Valued at $1 Billion, Also Focused on 'Recursive Self-Improvement'
Former Anthropic employees Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta have founded a startup named Mirendil, securing $200 million in seed funding at a $1 billion valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and NVIDIA. The company, staffed by researchers from Anthropic, xAI, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI, aims to accelerate scientific discovery by focusing on "recursive self-improvement" for AI.
Their vision, described as "AI for AI for Science," is to build a platform enabling research labs in fields like medicine and materials science to develop and iteratively improve their own specialized AI models, rather than relying on general-purpose models from large tech firms. Neyshabur argues this approach, involving AI that can optimize its own code under human supervision, is the fastest path to AI-accelerated science.
The founders believe a market opportunity exists because major AI companies, while increasingly using AI to advance their own research, restrict external developers from using their models to train competing products. Mirendil plans to release its first models soon to gather early user feedback, with the goal of empowering thousands of labs to tackle critical scientific challenges.
marsbit06/26 03:26
