Tuesday, 27 June 2023, Bengaluru, India
Developers seeking to create AI-powered applications are in a frenzy due to the success of substantial language models like GPT. Building AI services, however, might be challenging, particularly given the current need for qualified developers to satisfy the growing demand.
Chaoyu Yang, a pioneering software developer at the data unicorn Databricks, steps in to help with it. He co-founded the AI development framework BentoML, which recently announced a seed funding round with his co-founders.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Yang stated that the management and maintenance of today’s AI services are challenging since they are frequently based on numerous machine learning models. Many new programmers come from full-stack or application development backgrounds, so they can only sometimes create the necessary AI infrastructure, prolonging the development cycle.
According to Yang, small businesses are accumulating “valuable data that can benefit greatly from AI,” but they “lack the resources to build the infrastructure for development.” At the same time, tech behemoths like Microsoft have the human capital and financial resources to build AI models and deploy them in practical applications.
BentoML is a tool in the same camp as SageMaker that aims to make it easier to create AI services. It offers a high-level API that abstracts away the specifics of the infrastructure required for running AI models in the cloud. It is a so-called AI application framework, a collection of tools that simplify the development, deployment, and scaling of AI applications, like a building tool kit used to build a house.
In as little as two days, developers may use BentoML to create Visual ChatGPT that is scalable and economical for usage in production. Users have also used the framework to run free source LLMs and the Stable Diffusion art generator on the cloud.
Yang compared his business to Vercel, a front-end developer-focused organization most recently valued at over $1 billion. According to him, BentoML wants to be the Verse of AI. Yang said he didn’t believe the surge of AI applications would happen so quickly, despite his prediction that AI would eventually become more production-ready. Over 90% of the platform’s users are anticipated to be AI software developers in the future, according to the founder.
BentoML released a self-hosted SaaS version for business customers after becoming open-sourced in 2019. Through its open-source community, which has grown from 3,000 members to over 4,000 in the past year, it has organically gained users. South Korean social networking juggernauts Line and Naver were among its early adopters.
Yang opted not to share the company’s revenue figures. Investors are aware of BentoML’s popularity among developers. The firm recently secured $9 million in a seed financing round co-led by DCM Ventures and Bow Capital. Hurst Lin, the general partner of DCM, has now joined the board of BentoML.
BentoML has benefited from the booming AI business, although Yang acknowledged that the team finds balancing short- and long-term objectives challenging due to the industry’s rapid change.
[Source of Information : Techcrunch.com]
