Report: Snowflake in talks to accumulate AI mannequin developer Reka AI for $1B+

Snowflake Inc. is reportedly holding talks to accumulate Reka AI Inc., a venture-backed supplier of enormous language fashions.

Sources informed Bloomberg late Thursday {that a} deal may worth the startup at greater than $1 billion. The information comes a couple of weeks after Reka debuted a brand new LLM, Reka Core, that it says is aggressive with frontier fashions from OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. The corporate says it skilled the algorithm over a number of months utilizing 1000’s of graphics playing cards. 

Reka was based in 2022 by former AI researchers from Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. Final yr, the LLM developer raised a $50 million funding spherical that included the participation of Snowflake’s enterprise capital arm. Based on Reuters, the funding valued Reka at about $300 million.

That Snowflake is now reportedly holding acquisition talks at a value greater than 3 times greater suggests vital optimism in regards to the LLM developer’s expertise. The potential acquisition value is especially notable provided that Reka doubtless has restricted gross sales. As of final June, the month its $50 million funding spherical was introduced, the LLM developer wasn’t but producing income. 

This week’s report in regards to the acquisition talks comes two months after Reka debuted its latest AI mannequin. Reka Core is a multimodal LLM that may course of not solely textual content but in addition photos, movies and audio. It’s able to ingesting prompts with as much as 128,000 tokens, items of knowledge that may every maintain a couple of letters or numbers.

Reka’s engineers in contrast the LLM in opposition to GPT-4 and Anthropic’s top-end Claude 3 Opus mannequin in a collection of inside exams. One of many evaluations used MMLU, a benchmark datasets that contains a number of thousand questions spanning dozens of matters. Reka Core answered 83.2% of the questions appropriately, which put it about 3% behind GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus.

Based on the corporate, the LLM managed to outperform Clause 3 Opus in a unique benchmark take a look at that in contrast the fashions’ multimodal information processing capabilities. Moreover, it proved more proficient than Google’s Gemini Extremely at sure video evaluation duties.

Reka provides Reka Core alongside two much less succesful however extra hardware-efficient fashions. The primary is named Reka Edge and contains a light-weight structure that permits it to run on units with restricted onboard computing capability. A 3rd mannequin, Reka Flash, is located between the corporate’s two different LLMs on the price-performance scale.

Snowflake would acquire extra than simply LLMs within the occasion the acquisition talks result in a deal. After saying its funding spherical final yr, Reka disclosed that it has developed proprietary mannequin distillation expertise. 

Mannequin distillation is a method that permits researchers to switch components of a complicated LLM’s information to a smaller, extra hardware-efficient mannequin. The latter AI subsequently good points the flexibility to carry out among the duties that its extra superior counterpart helps. Utilizing a smaller LLM to carry out processing duties lowers {hardware} necessities and thereby cuts prices.

MosaicML Inc., one other venture-backed supplier of LLMs and mannequin improvement expertise, was acquired final yr by Snowflake rival Databricks Inc. in a $1.3 billion deal. Databricks used the software program it obtained by the transaction to launch an AI coaching toolkit referred to as Mosaic AI Coaching. The acquisition additionally helped Databricks developed its not too long ago launched DBRX open-source LLM.

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