Interested in anyone who knows about this company (they have a lot of ML hiring listings right now). Basically wondering if it’s worth exploring more. They have apparently raised $240mln and are a unicorn so this is an important topic.
Here is the summary of some red flags I have found:
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Founders have no ML background
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Zero released product after several years despite huge funding.
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TC article says founded 2021, but every listing claims it is YC2017. One of the founders did a recruiting service from YC 2017, but Imbue is a totally unrelated company with a different founding group so claiming YC affiliation seems dubious/unethical. YC is also not named as an investor in the company anywhere on their website.
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No-one I have spoken to has ever worked with them/ heard of them outside press
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Claim to have raised $240mln, but not clear who from. Named investors on recent $200mln round are “Astera Institute, NVIDIA, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, Notion co-founder Simon Last and others” which seems like a random group and there is no named lead. As a matter of fact, there is not a single VC named anywhere in their marketing as an investor which would be very unusual for a SF AI startup that has raised >$200mln. Crunchbase also has no VCs/institutional investors recorded. I couldn’t find any investor that I would expect to have done significant due diligence. A month after they raised $200mln, they prominently announced that they raised another $12mln from Amazon Alexa and Eric Schmidt - this seems like a pure publicity stunt to me. This announcement of an extra 5% in round funding got a bunch of press articles about it also. They push the press angle incredibly hard.
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Their CEO has been in the press claiming that they buy their own chips, and they also claim to have a 10k H100 stack, but they literally haven’t raised enough funding to buy that many H100s. Maybe they are renting and all the press about buying is just press?
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The press/publicity to product ratio is extremely high. Dozens of articles in major publications with nothing released and no claimed customers.
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Their site is full of gushy statements with no detail like “We pretrain very large (>100B parameter) models, optimized for internal reasoning benchmarks.” (internal reasoning benchmarks is a great way to pretend you have competitive models!) and “Our north star: truly personal computers that give us freedom, dignity, and agency to do what we love”. As far as I can tell, Imbue has never released even a 3B or 7B open source model like a bunch of similar startups have.
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Their “Our Work” blog that should showcase their research and products contains 4 articles from 2023. 2 of them are opinion pieces on LLM ethics that contain no technical details, 1 is a niche piece on RL in hyperparameter search, and 1 discusses SSL on ResNet50 - a 23mln param CNN that is 5,000 times smaller than the LLMs they are apparently training.
Of course red flags are just that - suggestions of a problem not evidence. Inflection is in a similar boat on many of the above points - their only public product is the inferior Pi model - but at least they have serious industry heavyweights in their management and research so I give them the benefit of the doubt.
So, to those in the know - is this a real company? Has it duped a bunch of rich individuals? Is it worth spending more time on?
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Someone who has IMO gold medals recently joined them over quant trading firms, sends a positive signal imo.
It’s a real firm. They’re associated with Ycombinator.
The direction of achieving robust reasoning in LLMs is both reasonable and likely to be achievable. It probably isn’t super easy, but lots of people are thinking about ways of achieving it and it’s an active area of research.
I’m not sure whether I’d invest in it, but it seems fine. It’s a reasonable direction and I’m sure there’s a way for people to be productive while working in that direction.
Seems risky but if you take enough cash as comp and don’t believe any paper comp valuations at face value I would see it as a reasonable gamble if you need a job
I interviewed there and got rejected on the final round in the spring. The people interviewing me seemed competent, and I liked their interview questions (I’m not exactly sure if I was rejected cause my answers were wrong, it didn’t seem that way to me, but I did kinda feel like me and last interviewer didn’t really click). Though after the fact I did do some research into the founders and yes was surprised by the fact that it’s more like she’s a silicon valley person more than AI person.
But Sam Altman is silicon valley person and he’s running OpenAI just fine (in terms of raising the valuation of the company and increasing returns to investors – which is the job of CEO). Although he had Ilya, I don’t think there is anyone that impressive running Generally Intelligent’s research.
Would you be willing to share (very broadly) what kind of questions were asked? Just curious.
Important to keep in mind that Ilya Sutskever and Andrey Karpathy were not anywhere near as popular when they were first joined OpenAI as they are now. There is a lot of hidden skills and talent within the team at imbue that we might not ens up considering to be one of the “greats” until years from now.
Ilya was on the ImageNet paper with Hinton that put Deep Learning on the map. I don’t see how you can get more “popular” than that.
I had an external recruiter reach out for one of their roles. To be honest, their interview process just seems too long, so I passed; one of the panels is a two day on-site. According to the recruiter, they’ve had not so great candidates being sent their way, so they’re a bit weary of that.
Not giving an opinion, just sharing info and my personal choice.
what did their interview process consist of?
By pass, I mean I decided not to move forward with the interview.
The link to their interview process is on all of their JDs; it’s a Notion page. I can link it later if you don’t find it
I think the things you’ve pointed out are not red flags. It’s sort of the primary job of a startup founder to be a salesman first and foremost, and that’s what these founders are doing. It’s also not crazy to think that they could have raised $200 million+ around 2021; back when interest rates were low people were happy to throw money around with reckless abandon.
There are some red flags, though. I think the concerning thing, to me, is the founders’ connections to cult-like movements. Consider:
- The founders lived together in one of those SF grouphouses, and they advertise this fact: https://archive.house/
- The CEO’s website, especially, has a lot of grandiose and millenarian language, and she seems to have a greatly exaggerated sense of her expertise regarding topics that she has no training in (especially psychology).
- The founders first met at a meeting for the Center For Applied Rationality (described early on in this podcast), which is/was sort of a central hub organization for the lesswrong crowd, who are notable for their cult-like behavior.
- In that same podcast episode (around 17:45 minute mark) the founders seem to obliquely imply that their $200 million funding comes from fellow “like-minded” people in the lesswrong crowd.
So, basically, the downside here is that the founders - and indeed all of the staff, if they’re hiring people like themselves - may have grandiose, millenarian ambitions that are not grounded in any kind of real science or practical business plan, and will never need such grounding because they have rich benefactors who think the same way.
This can be fine, depending on your goals. If the paychecks clear and you get to do things that you want to do, maybe there’s no big downside. The biggest risk is the potential for the usual downsides that come with cult associations: incompetent management and dysfunctional social environments. No way to know if that’s the case until you talk to them, though.
5 years with no product, no research, yet raised $200 million at a >$1 billion valuation is a major red flag. Going to become the next Theranos/Magic Leap.
no product, no research, yet raised $200 million at a >$1 billion valuation
Anthropic, Cohere, Inflection, Adept and Mistral went through the same steps. All are real companies that eventually put out a product.
cc u/Witty-Elk2052
All the companies that were listed have put out products and research within 5 years of being founded, and they all have had founders with previous relevant experience shipping products and models.
Imbue was basically inactive during their first 3-4 years and the 200+ million investment was made last month. The companies I listed started shipping after they received investor money. It makes sense in context.
They raised $20 million a year ago and was funded by YC in 2017. Anyway, I don’t have a dog in the fight. When investors inevitably lose their money I’ll probably feel some schraudenfreude for a few seconds and get on with my day.
sad waste of money
Hi, I have some context re: the founder.
- No formal ML background. But fwiw plenty of people have had no ML background and done good things in ML. Even if you just look at big contributors in OpenAI.
- Their first few years was with Sourceress, which was both unrelated and not done with “huge funding”. The hard pivot to Generally Intelligent was a few years later. And they only raised their big rounds recently.
- I’m not sure but probably they kept the same corporation (and perhaps returned $ to some investors) as part of the pivot from Sourceress
(4-9, I don’t know enough, and so can’t answer well.). I think the founders are a little futurist, maybe optimistic and stretched by a lot of initiatives, but not scammers. I don’t know the quality of the current company and what they can build.
It sucks to have information you can’t disclose lol
Do you mean that you have some information about the company? Negative or positive?
It does. That would be telling.
I just listened to the ceo on the latent space podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/latent-space-the-ai-engineer-podcast-codegen-agents/id1674008350?i=1000631322801
She definitely seems like a Silicon Valley insider with the right credentials. But I also agree that the company sets off some red flags with no business strategy. Then again, openai didn’t have a busniess strategy at the beginning.
I bet you’d learn a lot by working there but not about shipping products. Just my barely informed take.