OpenAI has hired the team behind venture-backed artificial intelligence startup Crossing Minds Inc.
Crossing Minds confirmed the deal, first reported by News today, in an update on its website without disclosing the financial terms. The company previously raised more than $13 million in funding from Shopify Inc., Index Ventures and other backers.
Crossing Minds was launched in 2016 by a team that included prominent AI researcher Sebastian Thrun. He earlier co-founded online education platform Udacity Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s X product research lab. Crossing Minds’ two other co-founders, Emile Contal and Alexandre Robicquet, are also AI researchers.
According to News, Robicquet has joined OpenAI in a research role. His work will encompass AI agents and post-training, a phase of the AI development process that focuses on enhancing model output quality. Post-training is an important element of the workflow through which reasoning models are developed.
It’s unclear how many of Crossing Minds’ other team members are joining OpenAI. There’s also no word on whether the ChatGPT developer has acquired the company’s technology, or whether it plans to make the technology available to users.
Before the deal, Crossing Minds offered an AI-powered product recommendation system for online retailers. It automatically generated shopping suggestions based on data such as a customer’s past purchases. According to Crossing Minds, the neural networks that power the software were developed using a custom version of gradient descent, a popular AI training method.
The company also offered two tools designed to ease the task of building AI applications.
The first tool was built to generate embeddings, the data structures in which AI neural networks keep information. The technical specifications of those data structures vary based on the information they contain.
An embedding that holds a complex code snippet, for example, is likely to require more RAM than one that stores a product description. Crossing Minds says that its tool generates embeddings optimized for data such as consumer shopping preferences.
The company’s second developer tool is called RAGSys. It’s designed to ease the task of equipping AI applications with RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation, features. The software works with off-the-shelf large language models from multiple AI providers, including OpenAI.
The acquisition is at least the third the ChatGPT developer has made since the start of the year. Last month, it bought Jony ive’s io Products Inc. in an all-stock deal worth $6.5 billion. A few weeks earlier, it reportedly spent about $3 billion to acquire Windsurf Inc., a startup with a popular AI coding tool.
Image: Unsplash
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