Agents are the subsequent massive factor in AI. Some outline these “agents” in another way from others, however the common thought 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. Founded 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 instructed 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.”
Using 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 stories and insights, and take particular actions. LlamaIndex offers knowledge connectors and utilities like LlamaParse, which transforms unstructured knowledge right into a structured format that can be utilized for specific AI functions.
While there are different open-source frameworks to construct AI brokers on the market, LlamaIndex is differentiated by its suite of information ingestion, knowledge administration, and knowledge indexing and retrieval options, Liu stated. It can join knowledge from recordsdata like PDFs and PowerPoint displays, in addition to apps akin to Notion and Slack, with an agent.
Salesforce, KPMG, and Carlyle are among the many corporations utilizing LlamaIndex at present, Liu stated.
“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. Called LlamaCloud, it lets prospects create cloud-hosted brokers that may work with and manipulate unstructured knowledge in a wide range of codecs.
LlamaCloud could be deployed through a software-as-a-service set up or in a digital non-public cloud, and comes with options together with role-based entry management and single sign-on, Liu stated.
In half to assist fund LlamaCloud’s improvement, LlamaIndex lately raised $19 million in a Series A funding spherical that was led by Norwest Venture Partners, and noticed participation from Greylock as properly. The new money brings LlamaIndex’s whole funding raised to $27.5 million, and Liu says that it’ll be used for increasing LlamaIndex’s 20-person crew, and product improvement.
“We have sufficient runway to take us through initial commercial expansion of our platform,” Liu stated. “We’re betting on a future where developers play a big role in delivering GenAI applications within the enterprise.”
