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A startup calledLettahas just egress from stealth with technical school that helps AI models remember user and conversations . create in UC Berkeley ’s famed research laboratory startup factory , it also announce $ 10 million in source money led by Felicis ’ Astasia Myers , at a $ 70 million post - money valuation .
Letta is also plump for by a who ’s who of angel investor in AI , like Google ’s Jeff Dean , Hugging Face ’s Clem Delangue , Runway ’s Cristóbal Valenzuela , and Anyscale ’s Robert Nishihara , among others .
Founded by Berkeley Ph.D. scholar Sarah Wooders and Charles Packer , this is a highly look to AI inauguration launch . That ’s because it ’s a child of Berkeley ’s Sky Computing Lab and is the commercial entity of the popular MemGPT subject reference projection .
Berkeley ’s Sky Computing Lab , lead by acclaimed prof and Databricks co - founder Ion Stoica , is the descendent of RISELab and AMPLab , which spawned such ship’s company as Anyscale , Databricks , and SiFive . Sky Lab , in especial , birth numerous pop candid source declamatory language manakin ( LLM ) task like the Gorilla LLM , vLLM , and the LLM structured language SGLang .
“ A ton of undertaking very quickly , within a year ’s time frame , came out of the lab . Just citizenry sit next to us , ” described Wooders . “ So it was kind of an incredible sentence . ”
MemGPT is one such project and is such a spicy good that it in reality go viral before it even launched .
“ Someone scooped us , ” Packer told TechCrunch . The founders hadposted a whitepaperon Thursday , October 12 , 2023 , and planned to release a more in - deepness paper and the code to GitHub the following Monday . Some random soul found the newspaper publisher , stake it to Hacker News on Sunday , and it “ go viral on Hacker News before we had a chance to properly release the computer code , release the paper , or , like , do a tweet thread or anything like that , ” he said .
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The reason for the excitement was that MemGPT mitigates a pernicious problem for LLMs : In their native form , models like ChatGPT are stateless , intend they do n’t stash away historic data in farseeing - term remembering . This is baffling for AI apps that depend on get to get laid and learn from a user over time — everything from customer support bot to healthcare symptom - tracking apps . MemGPT make do datum and retentiveness so that AI agents and chatbots can remember former users and conversations .
The Charles William Post on the report stayed atop Hacker News , the pop site for programmers run by Y Combinator , for 48 hours , Packer recounted . So he spend his weekend and the next few day answer enquiry on the situation while seek to get the computer code ready to be released . Once the project was available on GitHub , a link to it went viral on Hacker News , again . YouTube interviewsand tutorials , average posts,11,000 stars and 1.2 K forkson GitHub befall cursorily .
VC Felicis ’ Myers discovered Wooders and Packer by take about MemGPT , too , and like a shot recognized the technical school ’s commercial possibilities .
“ I watch the paper when it was released , ” she told TechCrunch , and she pronto hand out to the beginner . “ We had an investing report around AI agent infrastructure and appreciated that a really authoritative constituent of that was the data and storage direction to make these conversational chat bot and AI agents effective . ”
The founder still near traipsed around Sand Hill Road doing Zoom call with VCs before going with the one that loved them first .
Meanwhile , Stoica brokered introductions to Dean , Nishihara and other big - name Silicon Valley Angel Falls . “ A lot of the professors at Berkeley , just as a consequence of being at Berkeley , are very well connected , ” Packer recalled about how easy the angel investor process was . “ They have their eye on projects out of this lab that are run to be commercialized . ”
Competition and the threat of OpenAI o1
While MemGPT is already out in the wilderness and being used , Letta ’s commercial-grade variant , Letta Cloud , is not yet open for business . As of Monday , Letta is accepting requests for beta users . It will offer a hosted factor service that allows developer to deploy and operate stateful agents in the cloud , accessible via REST APIs , a programming port that can keep state . Letta Cloud will store the long - term data necessary to do so . Letta will also put up developer tool for building AI agents .
With MemGPT , Wooders sees a bombastic span of utilization . “ I think the number one employment case that we see is fundamentally , highly personalize , very engaging chatbots , ” she says . But there are also cut - edge US like “ a chatbot for genus Cancer patients ” where patient upload their history and then divvy up on-going symptoms so the bot can learn and volunteer guidance over time .
deserving noting that MemGPT is n’t alone in function on this . LangChain is believably its well screw competitor , and it already offer commercial options . The with child role model manufacturer also offer AI agent - making tools as well , like OpenAI ’s Assistants API .
And OpenAI ’s novel o1 modeling may make the need to desexualize state a moot percentage point for its users . As it is a multistep model , it fundamentally must maintain state to some grade so as to “ think ” and fact check before it replies .
But Wooders , Packer , and Myers see a few key divergence to what Letta is offering versus what 800 - pound food market Gorilla gorilla OpenAI is doing . Letta claims it will work with any AI model and expects its users to use many of them : OpenAI , Anthropic , Mistral , their own homegrown poser . OpenAI ’s tech currently only works with itself .
More significantly , Letta is using open source MemGPT andjumping firmly into the subject author side of the FOSS vs. black box LLM debate , allege open source is a better option for AI software program programmers .
“ We are positioning ourselves as the capable alternative to OpenAI , ” Packer says . “ I think it ’s really very , very hard to build up very good AI applications , particularly when you care about , like hallucination , if you ca n’t see what ’s going on under the goon . ”
