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Video technology startup Luma AI stated it raised $900 million in a brand new funding spherical led by Humain, a man-made intelligence firm owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund.
The financing, which included participation from Superior Micro Units’ enterprise arm and present buyers Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Companions and Matrix Companions, was introduced on the U.S.-Saudi Funding Discussion board on Wednesday.
The corporate is now valued upwards of $4 billion, CNBC has confirmed.
Luma develops multimodal “world fashions” which can be in a position to study from not solely textual content, but additionally video, audio and pictures as a way to simulate actuality. CEO Amit Jain informed CNBC in an interview that these fashions increase past giant language fashions, that are solely educated on textual content, to be simpler in “serving to in the actual, bodily world.”
“With this funding, we plan to scale our and speed up our efforts in coaching after which deploying these world fashions right this moment,” Jain stated.
Luma launched Ray3 in September, the primary reasoning video mannequin that may interpret prompts to create movies, pictures and audio. Jain stated Ray3 presently benchmarks greater than OpenAI’s Sora 2 and across the identical degree as Google’s Veo 3.
Humain, which was launched in Could, is aiming to ship full-stack AI capabilities to bolster Saudi Arabia’s place as a world AI hub. The corporate is led by trade veteran Tareq Amin, who beforehand ran Aramco Digital and earlier than that was CEO of Rakuten Cellular.
The corporate additionally introduced a lot of partnerships on the discussion board, together with separate knowledge middle buildouts with AMD and Cisco, GlobalAI (with Nvidia infrastructure) and Elon Musk’s xAI.
Luma and Humain will even accomplice to construct a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster, dubbed Venture Halo, in Saudi Arabia. The buildout shall be one of many one of many largest deployments of graphic processing items (GPUs) on this planet, Jain stated.
Main tech firms have been investing in supercomputers throughout the globe to coach huge AI fashions. In July, Meta introduced plans to construct a 1-gigawatt supercluster referred to as Prometheus, and Microsoft deployed the primary supercomputing cluster utilizing the Nvidia GB300 NVL72 platform in October.
“Our funding in Luma AI, mixed with HUMAIN’s 2GW supercluster, positions us to coach, deploy, and scale multimodal intelligence at a frontier degree,” Amin stated in a launch. “This partnership units a brand new benchmark for the way capital, compute, and functionality come collectively.”
The collaboration additionally consists of Humain Create, an initiative to create sovereign AI fashions educated on Arabic and regional knowledge. Together with specializing in constructing the world’s first Arabic video mannequin, Jain stated Luma fashions and capabilities shall be deployed to Center Japanese companies.
He added that since most fashions are educated by scraping knowledge from the web, nations outdoors the U.S. and Asia are sometimes much less represented in AI-generated content material.
“It is actually essential that we carry these cultures, their identities, their illustration — visible and behavioral and every part — to our mannequin,” Jain stated.
AI-generated content material instruments have acquired vital backlash over the previous 12 months from leisure studios over copyright issues. Luma’s flagship text-to-video platform Dream Machine garnered some accusations of copying IP earlier this 12 months, however Jain the corporate has put in safeguards to forestall undesirable utilization.
“Even in case you actually attempt to trick it, we’re always bettering it,” he stated. “We’ve got constructed very strong programs which can be really utilizing fashions we educated to detect them.”
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