Silicon Valley veteran Anna Patterson, known for her impressive entrepreneurial and engineering background, has launched her latest venture, Ceramic.ai, a startup focused on revolutionizing language model training infrastructure for enterprises. Patterson, who has founded three startups, including search engine upstarts Xift and Cuil, as well as recall.archive.org, which became the Internet Archive, has set her sights on tackling the complexities of large language model (LLM) training.

According to Patterson, the idea for Ceramic.ai was born out of her frustration with the existing infrastructure for building LLMs, which she deemed too complicated for enterprise adoption at scale. "Whenever you're trying to stretch an infrastructure 10x, it usually works no problem," Patterson explained. "But when you're trying to stretch it, you know, 100x or more, you often have to kind of take a step back and rethink it." This realization led Patterson to co-found Ceramic.ai with Tom Costello, the company's chief scientist, in January 2024.

Ceramic.ai's innovative approach promises to enable enterprises to train large language models faster using fewer GPUs than the current state-of-the-art. The startup's model is designed to work with any clusters and handle long contexts, with the ambitious goal of helping models scale by 100 times. This technology has the potential to significantly accelerate the development and deployment of AI applications across various industries.

Despite operating in stealth mode since its inception, Ceramic.ai has already secured partnerships with prominent players like AWS and Lambda. The startup has also raised a $12 million seed round led by NEA, with participation from IBM, Samsung Next, and Earthshot Ventures. Patterson attributed the choice of NEA as the lead investor to the firm's technical expertise. The funding will primarily be used to drive sales and continued development.

Patterson's experience as a venture capitalist has influenced her approach to building startups, with a greater emphasis on time efficiency and customer feedback. "When I was younger building companies, I felt this really relaxing time of like running a just engineering, no-sales company," she reflected. "Whereas now, you know after being a VC for a number of years, I definitely feel more time pressured." This shift in perspective has led Patterson to prioritize getting Ceramic.ai's product in front of customers earlier to gather feedback and iterate.

Ceramic.ai is entering a competitive market, with rivals like Together AI, which has raised over $530 million in venture capital, and MosiacML, acquired by Databricks in 2023 for $1.3 billion. To succeed, Ceramic.ai will need to differentiate itself and demonstrate the value of its innovative infrastructure to enterprises.

As the AI landscape continues to evolve, Ceramic.ai's emergence marks an exciting development in the field of language model training. With Patterson's expertise and vision at the helm, the startup is poised to make a significant impact in the industry.