Uptime Industries is taking a wager on on-premise AI infrastructure with an “AI-in-a-box” handheld system referred to as Lemony AI.
The scale of a sandwich, Lemony AI can supposedly run a big language mannequin (LLM), AI brokers, and AI workflows all on one node. Every Lemony requires solely 65 watts of energy to run, the equal of charging a laptop computer, and could be stacked and linked to kind greater AI clusters.
Sascha Buehrle, co-founder and CEO of Uptime, advised iinfoai that every node can maintain an LLM as much as 75 billion parameters in measurement, and may host open supply fashions or retrofitted variations of closed fashions. In a cluster of Lemony nodes, every system can run a special mannequin.
Uptime is launching with partnerships with IBM and JetBrains to offer its clients simpler entry to AI fashions, together with IBM’s closed fashions.
Like most tech startups, the thought for Lemony AI stemmed from a facet challenge: Uptime’s co-founders, Buehrle and Ivan Kuleshov, had been attempting to determine if they might distribute language fashions on Raspberry Pi’s micro computer systems, and whereas this wasn’t initially associated to generative AI, when it labored, they began attempting to see what else these Raspberry Pis may deal with.
Once they realized operating fashions on native gadgets may show the important thing to unlock extra AI adoption by organizations — say, enterprises that don’t need to use cloud-based fashions — they began constructing a tool of their very own. They figured going small with an emphasis on knowledge privateness may get corporations to undertake AI faster.
“We have to construct one thing small which might go simply into the groups, and which [does] not require any organization-wide choice making — bringing on-premise generative AI options into the enterprise groups, principally,” Buehrle mentioned. Clusters of small and highly effective gadgets may help the system develop in accordance with a buyer’s wants, he added.
The corporate says it has already seen robust demand from enterprise in heavily-regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and legislation.
“All the pieces stays in your field,” Buehrle mentioned. “So your paperwork, your recordsdata, your emails — the fashions are hosted within the field, the brokers are operating regionally within the field, and nothing is leaving the field.”
Uptime has thus far raised $2 million in a seed funding spherical led by True Ventures, with participation from Alumni Ventures, JetBrains, and a few angel buyers. The corporate will use the funds to additional develop its gadgets.
The startup says the plan now could be to get the software program it has developed for its micro AI computer systems, Lemony OS, to work on different corporations’ {hardware}, just like the Nvidia DGX Spark. It additionally needs to broaden the software program from its present, single-user focus to 1 that can be utilized by groups.
Lemony AI prices $499 a month to make use of, and could be accessed by as much as 5 customers.
