Jurassic-2 and APIs offer write stuff for creatives using AI

Israel-based startup AI21 Labs has released what it claims to be the world's most customisable language model, along with details of five new APIs aimed at organisations building their own AI applications and services at scale.

"When we released Jurassic-1, we were the first company to offer open access to LLMs without any waiting list, allowing anyone to build textual generative AI apps," says Ori Goshen, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of AI21 Labs. "The Jurassic-2 family of models represents the next leap forward and will enable developers and organisations to build text-based applications faster, with state-of-the-art performance at a fraction of the cost. 

“For those who don't need all the capabilities for Jurassic-2 but still want to integrate generative AI into their websites, we also have new task-specific APIs to make our language models easily available to businesses and their needs."

AI21 Labs launched Jurassic-1 in 2021, which allowed the company to develop and launch Latitude, which used Jurassic-1 to scale production of its gaming worlds while reducing costs, Harambee, which used a custom chatbot to increase sign-ups for its youth employment programs, and Verb, which used Jurassic-1 to build a writing tool specifically for authors. 

Jurassic-2’s new features include advanced instruction following capabilities, thanks to comprehensive instruction tuning on proprietary data; support for more languages, including Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch; and reduced latency, with up to 30% faster response times for Jumbo models compared to Jurassic-1.

Studio platform has way with words

As with Jurassic-1, Jurassic-2 will be available through AI21 Studio, an NLP-as-a-service developer platform, and will be offered in three sizes: Large, Grande, and Jumbo, each of which has a separate instruction-tuned version. 

AI21 Studio allows developers to build text-based applications like virtual assistants, chatbots, text simplifiers, content moderators, and creative writing aids.

The platform is one of AI21 Labs’ three core products, the others being Wordtune, which the company claims is the first AI-based writing companion that understands context and meaning and Wordtune Read, an AI-based reading companion offers abstracts and summaries of articles, reports, and PDFs.

Alongside Jurassic-2, AI21 Labs is also releasing five new APIs for commercial use that are offered individually and can be used for various tasks, such as correcting grammar and summarising articles:

• Paraphrase: Rewrites up to an entire paragraph of text, matching the style to the need
• Summarise: Provides a complete summary of long-form articles
• Text recommendations: Offers improvements to a given text, for example, increasing and diversifying vocabulary
• Grammatical error correction: Checks the grammar in written work
• Text segmentation: Splits long pieces of text into appropriate segments based on topics