Flapping Airplanes secures one billion dollars to build efficient AI models

Artificial intelligence research startup Flapping Airplanes has closed a $1 billion Series A round that values the one-year-old venture at $6 billion. The financing was co-led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, alongside participants including Sequoia Capital, GV, and Kleiner Perkins. The valuation quadruples the $1.5 billion figure set during the firm's $180 million seed round nine months ago. [1][2]

Founded by Aidan Smith alongside brothers Asher and Ben Spector, the company aims to drastically lower training costs by building models that require far less data. The lab's core technology centers on a proprietary megakernel framework that executes training runs and serves inference concurrently on a single GPU. Flapping Airplanes says this approach overlaps memory-bound inference with compute-bound training, preventing processors from sitting idle. [2]

Although the lab has not yet released a commercial product, its backers are betting heavily on alternatives to resource-intensive training runs. Flapping Airplanes intends to use the new capital to expand its engineering team as it attempts to demonstrate that sophisticated AI systems can be developed without ingesting massive swaths of web data. [1][2]