Together AI

Together AI is a cloud-based platform designed to accelerate the development and deployment of large-scale generative AI models. It offers a suite of tools for building, fine-tuning, and scaling these powerful AI models, all within a single platform.

Key Features

• Together Inference: Provides high-performance and cost-effective inference for pre-trained models.
• Together Fine-tuning: Enables developers to fine-tune existing open-source models with their data for improved accuracy.
• Together GPU Clusters: Offers on-demand access to high-end GPU clusters with H100 and A100 GPUs for large-scale training and fine-tuning.
• Open-Source Focus: Supports and contributes to open-source models and datasets, including RedPajama and FlashAttention-3.
• Scalability: The platform is designed to scale with user needs, offering both serverless and dedicated instances for inference.
• Custom Models: Allows users to train entirely new models from scratch using various architectures.

Competitive Advantages

• Performance: Together AI claims to offer the fastest inference speeds for large language models (LLMs) compared to competitors like OpenAI and Mosaic ML.
• Cost-Effectiveness: They claim to provide cost-efficient solutions, with Together Inference offering up to 11x lower costs for certain models compared to alternatives.
• Cutting-Edge Research: The company invests heavily in research and development, contributing to advancements in areas like training efficiency (Cocktail SGD) and model architectures (FlashAttention-3).

Target Users

• Machine Learning Engineers: Provides tools to build and fine-tune complex generative AI models.
• Data Scientists: Enables leveraging large datasets for improved model accuracy.
• Researchers: Supports research efforts through open-source contributions and high-performance computing resources.
• Businesses: Offers a platform to develop and deploy AI-powered applications for various industries.

Potential Limitations

• Limited Transparency: The details of their performance benchmarks and pricing structure are not readily available on their website.
• Vendor Lock-In: While they support open-source models, heavy reliance on their platform might lead to vendor lock-in for some users.
• Focus on Large Models: The platform seems geared towards large-scale generative models, which might not be suitable for all use cases.

Conclusion

Together AI is a promising platform for developers and businesses working with large-scale generative AI models. Their focus on performance, cost-effectiveness, and open-source innovation makes them a strong contender in the field. However, potential users should be aware of the limitations in terms of transparency and potential vendor lock-in before committing to the platform.