Humans& says its A.I. will support workers rather than replace them

Humans&, a San Francisco A.I. start-up founded by researchers from Anthropic, Google and xAI, says it will focus on using artificial intelligence to support human workers rather than replace them. The company was started by Andi Peng, Georges Harik, Noah Goodman, Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He.

Ms. Peng left Anthropic in part because she concluded many A.I. efforts were aimed at replacing people; she said, “That was never my motivation. I think of machines and humans as complementary.” Humans& has raised $480 million in seed funding from investors including Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, SV Angel and Google Ventures and is valued at $4.48 billion, even though it has only about 20 employees and launched three months ago, the report said.

“A lot of our investors are human, and they care where humanity is going,” Mr. Harik said. Executives at Humans& say the company will build software that facilitates collaboration—like an A.I. version of an instant messaging app—while also assisting with searches and other machine-suited tasks.

Mr. Zelikman, the company’s chief executive, said current chatbots are designed to answer questions but are “not good at asking them,” and argued that “the current paradigm — questioning and answering — is not going to get us there.” The founders plan to use existing A.I. techniques to train systems to be more interactive, to request information from users and to store it for later use.

Key Topics

Tech, Humans&, San Francisco, Anthropic, Xai, Jeff Bezos