Reka, an AI research and product company, has emerged from stealth with $58 million in funding led by DST Global Partners and founding investor Radical Ventures.
Reka aims to advance the science and build generative AI models "for the benefit of humanity, organizations, and enterprises." It focuses on universal intelligence, general-purpose multimodal and multilingual agents, self-improving AI, and model efficiency.
Co-founder and Chief Scientist Yi Tay is a former member of the Google Brain team who was involved in the research for Google's LLM PaLM 2 and the Pathways AI concept.
CTO Cyprien de Masson d'Autume was a staff research engineer at DeepMind (2016-2022), working on Gopher and AlphaCode.
CEO Dani Yogatama was also a senior staff research scientist at DeepMind (2016-2022) and a research scientist at Baidu Silicon Valley AI Lab (2015). He contributed to Deeminds Starcraft AI AlphaStar and DeepSpeech. The rest of the team also mostly has a big tech background with a focus on machine learning.
Reka is working on Yasa, an enterprise-grade multimodal chatbot
The company is currently developing an AI assistant that is in closed beta. It's called Yasa, and according to the description on Reka's website, it's an "enterprise-grade multimodal assistant carefully designed with privacy, security, and efficiency in mind."
You can create an account on Reka's website and apply for beta access, where you can chat with the model or upload images to have a conversation about their content, a feature OpenAI promised for GPT-4 at its reveal in March but has yet to release.
Reka is hiring for both technical and non-technical roles, with a globally distributed, remote-first team headquartered in San Francisco and an office in the UK.