Generative artificial intelligence research lab AI21 Labs Ltd. is releasing what it claims is the world’s most customizable large language model, Jurassic-2, for organizations that want to build advanced, chat-based AI applications at large scale.

Ai21 Labs is both an AI research lab and a commercial entity that offers its natural language processing capabilities as a service. The company’s stated mission is to shift and shape the way people read and write by making AI a “thought partner” to humans, and to advance that goal it has created a number of useful NLP applications based on Jurassic-1, its original language model that was launched in 2021.

Its applications include Wordtune, an AI-powered writing companion that’s able to understand content and meaning to help people write down their ideas in a clearer and more compelling way, and also Wordtune Read, which can analyze long documents in seconds and create a simplified summary. It helps users read and understand long and complicated texts faster and more efficiently.

Plenty of companies have made use of Jurassic-1 too, including the video game development platform Latitude.io, which uses generative AI to scale the production of its gaming worlds, and the youth employment accelerator Harambee, which created a custom chatbot to increase signups to its programs.

AI21 Labs has also developed its own chatbots based on Jurassic-1. They include the quirky “Ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg” AI that was trained on more than 27 years’ worth of the late U.S. Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s published interviews, speeches and written texts.

Generative AI has been making a lot of noise lately thanks to the success of OpenAI LLC’s hit chatbot ChatGPT, and there’s huge excitement about its potential applications in areas such as search. Thanks to ChatGPT’s incredible popularity and its close association with Microsoft Corp., OpenAI is considered by many to be the leader in generative AI.

However, AI21 Labs has attracted some significant funds of its own, and analysts say its Jurassic models are a viable alternative to the GPT-3 model that powers ChatGPT. For instance, a comparative study performed by Stanford University shows that Jurassic-2 ranks very well next to other commercially available LLMs.

“Our largest model, Jurassic-2 Jumbo, is second to OpenAI’s models, with additional smaller models of ours being in the same league as DaVinci 2 & 3, for example,” Udi Karpas, squad director at AI21 Labs Studio, told SiliconANGLE. “Jurassic-2 Grande also outperforms many competitor models despite its smaller size.”

With the launch of Jurassic-2, AI21 Labs is offering its customers a more advanced baseline model with dozens of new features that should make it possible to build even more advanced chatbots. For instance, it’s said to have more advanced instruction following capabilities that are enabled by comprehensive instruction tuning on proprietary data. It also supports more languages, with new additions that include Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, and has reduced latency, with response times up to 30% faster than Jurassic-1.

Alongside Jurassic-2, AI21 Labs also released five new APIs based on the new model for commercial use. They include Paraphrase, which can rewrite up to a full paragraph of text, matching the style to the user’s requirements; Summarize, which provides a full summary of long-form articles; Text Recommendations, which offers improvements to any given text, for example by increasing and diversifying the vocabulary; Grammatical error correction, which checks for grammatical errors; and Text Segmentation, which splits long pieces of text into appropriate segments, based on topics.

Karpas told SiliconANGLE that though Jurassic-2 is comparable with GPT-3 in many ways, its main strengths lie in reading and writing, focused on tasks such as text completion, text generation and summarization. “Jurassic-2 can support any application which is text-centric,” he said. “Examples of products currently supported include gaming, writing assistants, product descriptions in e-commerce and more.”

AI21 Labs said Jurassic-2 itself will be made available as an NLP-as-a-service developer platform through AI21 Studio, with three sizes available. Developers can use Jurassic-2 to create text-based applications such as chatbots, virtual assistants, text simplification and content moderation tools, writing assistants and more, the startup said.

For existing customers, Jurassic-2 will also be 10% cheaper than its predecessor, with custom models costing the same as basic ones, the company said.

Constellation Research Inc. Vice President and Principal Analyst Andy Thurai told SiliconANGLE that a number of things about Jurassic-2 stand out, including the fact that although its parameters are only slightly higher than competing LLMs, including GPT-3, its vocabulary is five times greater, making it much more accurate in providing language solutions to consumers. He also noted that Jurassic-2 looks to be very competitive in terms of its costs.

“AI21’s NLP-as-a-service developer platform will be offered in three sizes – large, grande and jumbo — providing customers with more flexibility regarding costs and capabilities, so they can choose according to their needs,” Thurai explained. “Cost, latency and results will vary based on the model used. The other LLMs, including GPT-3, provide only a one-size-fits-all model. So the costs and latency are fixed and not variable.”

Co-founder and co-Chief Executive Ori Goshen said his company was the first to provide open access to LLMs without any waiting list when it first launched Jurassic-1, making it possible for anyone to build text-based generative AI applications. “The Jurassic-2 family of models represents the next leap forward and will enable developers and organizations to build text-based applications, faster, with state-of-the-art performance at a fraction of the cost,” he said.

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