LM Area, a crowdsourced benchmarking mission that main AI labs depend on to check and market their AI fashions, has raised $100 million in a seed funding spherical that values the group at $600 million, in line with Bloomberg.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and UC Investments, which manages an funding portfolio for the College of California, led the fundraising. Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, Felicis Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins additionally participated.
Based in 2023, LM Area has turn out to be one thing of an AI trade obsession. Primarily run by UC Berkeley-affiliated researchers, LM Area has partnered with firms corresponding to OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to make flagship fashions obtainable for its neighborhood to judge.
LM Area was beforehand funded by a mix of grants and donations, together with from Google’s Kaggle knowledge science platform, a16z, and Collectively AI. Not too long ago, it’s been accused by some researchers of serving to prime AI labs sport its leaderboard — accusations that LM Area has vehemently denied.
