We just announced raising a $4.5M seed round to help Moondream deliver vision AI that works reliably and runs everywhere.
Large language models won out over traditional NLP techniques in many cases because they offer a better developer experience. Companies using LLMs in production are often using them for tasks like entity extraction and classification, not the new capabilities they enable.
The key benefit of LLMs is that they make it possible for normal developers to deploy these capabilities. Companies no longer have to staff expensive ML teams or deal with data labeling and model training.
A similar trend will play out in computer vision over the next few years. But we have a lot of work ahead of us to make that happen.
Vision language models available today just don't work reliably on the tasks you care about when building AI applications. While our competitors waste time training their models to explain jokes, we're laser-focused on delivering the accuracy you need on tasks that actually matter, like reading gauges.
Model footprint is another key issue in vision. These models need to run in edge environments, and they need to run fast. We're building distillation tools and inference libraries to make it possible to deploy vision AI in any environment. There's no reason you can't have your cake, and eat it too.
We're proud to be backed by the world's best investors: Felicis, the Microsoft/Github M12 fund, and Ascend. Whether you're a developer looking to integrate vision AI, or an enterprise seeking efficient solutions, we'd love to show you what Moondream can do.