Symbolica Gets IDR 492.6 Billion Investment To Develop Alternative AI

CEO of Symbolica, George Morgan, (photo: x @vr4300)

JAKARTA - The artificial intelligence startup Symbolica, which is developing a basic model to compete with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, announced a series A funding round of US$31 million (Rp492.6 billion) led by Khosla Ventures on Tuesday, April 9.

General Catalyst, Abstract Ventures, and▁gagasan Ventures also participated in the round, the company said.

"Symbolica has created a framework that will allow it to develop alternatives to transformer's deep learning architecture," said Symbolica CEO George Morgan, who previously worked at Tesla on self-driving systems. This refers to a paper co-authored with Google-made intelligence subsidiary DeepMind. Transformers are the basis of ChatGPT's viral chatbots and today's generative artificial intelligence race.

"Transformers are not everything in artificial intelligence," Morgan said. "What's happening in the industry now is a trick over a trick."

Whether artificial intelligence can continue to rapidly improve its performance through increased computing power and further training data is a heated debate. Some companies, such as the Microsoft-backed OpenAI, are fully focused on increasing computing power.

Meanwhile, others, such as Symbolica, think that different architectures of basic models will be able to produce better results than scaled transformers.

"Overall, the industry is dealing with transformer limitations, be it the costs needed to pack them or their reliability," said General Catalyst partner Christopher Kauffman.

"The first project of Symbolica will be an assistant programming, although it won't be launched until early 2025," Morgan said. This is because the company needs to recruit and train its model.