Humans&, a human-centric AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, and Google alums, has raised $480 million in a seed round

Humans&a startup with a philosophy that AI should empower people rather than replace them, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a $4.48 billion valuation. The New York Times reports. Investors in the round include chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, venture capital firms SV Angel, Google Ventures, and Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective.

The three-month-old company’s mega deal follows a trend Investors throw money in Startups founded by dissidents One of the major artificial intelligence laboratories. Humans’ co-founders include Andy Peng, a former anthropologist who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training for Cloud 3.5 to 4.5; George Harrick, Google’s seventh employee who helped build the company’s first advertising systems; Eric Zelekman and Yuchen He, former XAI researchers who helped develop the chatbot Grok; and Noah Goodman, professor of psychology and computer science at Stanford University.

Humans&’s 20 employees also come from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2 and MIT, according to the company. The startup aims to use software to help people collaborate with each other — think an AI version of an instant messaging app. One of their goals is to use existing AI techniques to train AI in new ways, such as programming chatbots to request information from the user and store it for later use.

In order to build AI that acts “as a deeper connective tissue that strengthens organizations and societies,” Humans& hopes to rethink “how models are trained at scale and how people interact with AI,” according to the company’s webpage. The startup cited the need for innovations in “long-term, multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding,” as well as an integrated focus on both science and product development.

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