年仅一岁的初创公司 Flapping Airplanes 凭借令人印象深刻的创始团队和以更少数据训练大模型的使命，震惊了硅谷。周三，该公司宣布完成 10 亿美元的 A 轮融资，由 Index 和 Lux 共同领投，据报道估值达 60 亿美元。
Year-old startup Flapping Airplanes has wowed Silicon Valley with an impressive founding team and a mission to find ways to train large models with less data. On Wednesday, the company announced it had raised a $1 billion Series A round, co-led by Index and Lux, reportedly at a $6 billion valuation.
这轮融资距离公司成立仅九个月，当时公司获得 GV、Sequoia 和 Index 领投的 1.8 亿美元种子轮融资。那轮种子融资给公司的估值为 15 亿美元，因此其估值刚刚翻了四倍。
The round comes just nine months after the company launched with a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia, and Index. That seed round had valued the company at $1.5 billion, so its valuation just quadrupled.
新一轮融资的其他参与方包括早期投资人 Sequoia、GV 和 Kleiner Perkins。Valor、Atreides、Kleiner Perkins、A* 和 Nvidia 也是该公司的投资方。
Other participants in the new round included earlier backers Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins. Valor, Atreides, Kleiner Perkins, A*, and Nvidia are also investors in the company.
Flapping Airplanes 由 Aidan Smith 以及 Asher 和 Ben Spector 兄弟创立。Smith 是一位连续创业者和 Thiel 奖学金获得者，大学期间曾在脑机接口公司 Neuralink 工作。Asher Spector 是斯坦福大学的统计学博士，而 Ben Spector 曾是斯坦福大学计算机科学博士生，并在 MIT 就读期间创立了 Prod。
Flapping Airplanes was founded by Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Smith is a former founder and Thiel fellow who worked at the brain implant company Neuralink during college. Asher Spector was a statistics PhD at Stanford, while Ben Spector was a computer science PhD student at Stanford and founded Prod while at MIT.
Prod 是一个近乎秘密社团般、已运营五年的学生主导创业加速器，“已成为硅谷最强大的人才孵化器之一”，Flapping Airplanes 投资人、Sequoia 合伙人 David Cahn 今年早些时候在一篇解释投资理由的文章中写道。正如 Cahn 所描述的，这几位创始人正在共同打造“年轻人的 AGI 实验室”。
Prod is an almost secret-society, five-year-old student-run startup accelerator that has “become one of the most powerful talent incubators in Silicon Valley,” wrote Sequoia partner David Cahn, a Flapping Planes investor, in a post earlier this year explaining why he invested. Together, the founders “are building the ‘young person’s AGI lab,'” as Cahn described it.
创始人将他们的工作描述为“世界上最完整的超级内核框架。它可以执行完整的训练运行、提供推理服务、运行视频游戏，甚至可以在单个内核中同时完成这三项任务。”（内核是运行在 GPU 上的程序，而超级内核将许多任务捆绑到一个程序中。）创始人声称该框架“可以将内存受限的推理与计算受限的训练重叠”，这意味着它可以将一个大部分时间都在等待数据获取的任务，与一个大部分时间都在进行数学运算的任务同时运行，从而使芯片极少处于空闲状态。
The founders describe their work as “the world’s most complete megakernel framework. It can perform entire training runs, serve inference, play video games, and even do all three simultaneously in a single kernel.” (A kernel is a program that runs on a GPU, and a megakernel bundles many tasks into one program.) The founders claim the framework “can overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training,” meaning it can run a task that spends most of its time waiting for data to be fetched alongside one that spends most of its time doing math, so the chip is rarely sitting idle.
其前提在于 AI 尚未触及 GPU 能力的表面，他们相信可以创造出“无需吞噬半个互联网”的智能系统。目标是训练和运行成本更低的系统。“一个数据效率高出一百万倍的模型，投入经济应用大概也会容易一百万倍，”初创公司推出不久后，Asher Spector 对 TechCrunch 表示。
The premise is that AI has barely scratched the surface of what GPUs can do, and they believe it can create intelligent systems “without ingesting half the internet.”The goal is systems that cost less to train and run. “A model that’s a million times more data efficient is probably a million times easier to put into the economy,” Asher Spector told TechCrunch shortly after the startup launched.
他们现在拥有新增的 10 亿美元资金，用于招聘并尝试将这一目标变为现实。
They now have a fresh $1 billion to hire and attempt to turn that goal into reality.