Brokers are the subsequent large factor in AI. Some outline these “agents” in another way from others, however the common concept is, they’re AI-powered instruments that may carry out duties autonomously.
The agent hype has reached a fever pitch, however one startup was comparatively early to the sport: LlamaIndex. Based by former Uber analysis scientists, Jerry Liu and Simon Suo, in 2023, LlamaIndex permits builders to construct customized brokers over unstructured knowledge.
“LlamaIndex started as a toy open-source project in November 2022,” Liu informed TechCrunch. “I became deeply interested in understanding how large language models (LLMs) could be used on top of proprietary data outside their training set, and built an initial set of tools enabling developers to index and include data in their LLM apps.”
Utilizing LlamaIndex’s open-source software program, which has racked up tens of millions of downloads on GitHub, builders can create customized brokers that may extract info, generate studies and insights, and take particular actions. LlamaIndex gives knowledge connectors and utilities like LlamaParse, which transforms unstructured knowledge right into a structured format that can be utilized for explicit AI functions.
Whereas there are different open-source frameworks to construct AI brokers on the market, LlamaIndex is differentiated by its suite of knowledge ingestion, knowledge administration, and knowledge indexing and retrieval options, Liu mentioned. It may well join knowledge from recordsdata like PDFs and PowerPoint displays, in addition to apps equivalent to Notion and Slack, with an agent.
Salesforce, KPMG, and Carlyle are among the many firms utilizing LlamaIndex in the present day, Liu mentioned.
“All of these competing solutions solve specific problems at different parts of the generative AI stack, but then it’s the developer’s responsibility to piece together fragmented solutions to create a working agent,” Liu added. “This is a significant pain point that hampers shipping agents to production. LlamaIndex made it our mission to deliver the most secure, accurate, and easy-to-use platform for building end-to-end knowledge agents.”
LlamaIndex’s subsequent chapter is an enterprise service constructed on prime of the corporate’s open-source choices. Known as LlamaCloud, it lets clients create cloud-hosted brokers that may work with and manipulate unstructured knowledge in quite a lot of codecs.
LlamaCloud could be deployed through a software-as-a-service set up or in a digital personal cloud, and comes with options together with role-based entry management and single sign-on, Liu mentioned.
Partly to assist fund LlamaCloud’s growth, LlamaIndex not too long ago raised $19 million in a Collection A funding spherical that was led by Norwest Enterprise Companions, and noticed participation from Greylock as properly. The brand new money brings LlamaIndex’s complete funding raised to $27.5 million, and Liu says that it’ll be used for increasing LlamaIndex’s 20-person group, and product growth.
“We have sufficient runway to take us through initial commercial expansion of our platform,” Liu mentioned. “We’re betting on a future where developers play a big role in delivering GenAI applications within the enterprise.”
