Flapping Airplanes Raises $1 Billion for Frugal AI

Flapping Airplanes, founded by Aidan Smith and the Spector brothers, promises a more data-efficient AI through a "megakernel" framework. The startup, which is about a year old, has closed a $1 billion Series A round, valuing the company at $6 billion. The new capital is intended to fund hiring and the continuation of its technical approach.

A "megakernel" to better leverage GPUs

The founders present their software as a highly comprehensive megakernel framework, capable of executing training loops, serving inference, and even performing these tasks in parallel within a single kernel. A kernel is a program that runs on a GPU; a megakernel consolidates multiple operations into one program. The team claims it can overlay inference, primarily limited by memory, with training, primarily limited by computation, in order to reduce chip idle times. They also argue that the potential of GPUs remains largely untapped and that it is possible to build systems without consuming a massive portion of the web. The stated goal is twofold: to create models that are cheaper to train and less expensive to run. Asher Spector summarized the ambition by explaining that a model that is much more data-efficient would likely be much easier to integrate into the economy.

$1 billion raised in Series A, valuation increased to $6 billion

On Wednesday, Flapping Airplanes announced a $1 billion Series A round, co-led by Index and Lux, which values the company at $6 billion. This round comes nine months after the company's launch. At its inception, the company raised $180 million from GV, Sequoia, and Index, with a valuation of $1.5 billion; since then, the valuation has quadrupled. Existing investors, including Sequoia, GV, and Kleiner Perkins, have also contributed to the round. Valor, Atreides, Kleiner Perkins, A*, and Nvidia are also among the investors. The company, which aims to train large models with less data, plans to use this new funding to recruit and strive to achieve its goals. The business has been in existence for about a year.

Founders and network: Smith, the Spector brothers, and Prod

The startup was created by Aidan Smith, Asher Spector, and Ben Spector. Smith is a former Thiel Fellow, an ex-founder, and worked at Neuralink during his studies. Asher Spector was pursuing a PhD in statistics at Stanford, while Ben Spector studied computer science at Stanford and founded Prod during a stint at MIT. Prod, a student-run accelerator active for five years, is described by David Cahn (Sequoia), an investor, as a nearly confidential talent pool. In a text published earlier this year to explain his investment, Cahn presents the team as building a "young AGI lab."