AI Startups on Intel® Liftoff: Real Stories, Real Impact

Intel® Liftoff equips AI startups with direct access to Intel's resources, fostering a hands-on and innovative environment for founders to thrive. This program combines Intel®'s tech expertise with the fresh ideas of new tech companies, focusing on practical uses in various fields like fintech, cybersecurity, media, e-commerce and many more.

Here we feature stories from these innovators, showing how Intel's support helps speed up their development and in turn, the trajectory of AI.

Mod Tech Labs' Breakthrough in Media Content Analysis

Alex Porter, CEO of Mod Tech Labs, highlights the impact of Intel® Liftoff on their product development. "This opportunity has been a game-changer for us," says Porter. The partnership facilitated a significant increase in processing speed and precision, essential for anomaly detection in media content, “With Intel® Liftoff's assistance, we were able to increase our speed by 32x and doubled our precision for anomaly detection in media content.”

Porter emphasizes, "It's not just about the development support; it's the strategic guidance and industry connections that have truly set us on a path to success."

Prediction Guard: Making Headway in Trustworthy Enterprise Applications

Daniel Whitenack of Prediction Guard points out the importance of Intel's leadership in security and performance. "Intel leads the way in terms of security and performance," he states. This collaboration has enabled them to focus on sustainable growth and scaling, crucial for enterprise applications leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs).

Moonshot's Efficient LLM Tuning with Intel®'s Support

Daniel Han-Chen from Moonshot - Ask the Impossible, shares their experience of learning to efficiently tune LLMs  at one of Intel® Liftoff’s hackathons, "The hack was super useful - learnt how to tune LLMs efficiently with LoRA," he remarks.

SiteMana's Leap in E-commerce Marketing Automation

As the founder Peter Ma from SiteMana, who was also a participant in the previous Intel Liftoff LLM hackathon  earlier this year, puts it: "With the stellar performance of Intel® GPU, Dolly 2.0, and OpenLlama at our disposal during the hackathon, we at SiteMana were able to build an LLM model inspired by state-of-the-art chatbots. The model was fine-tuned to write personalized emails, and the deployment and testing phase was surprisingly seamless. Empowered by the tremendous performance of Intel® GPU, we at SiteMana, during the hackathon, leveraged Dolly 2.0 and OpenLlama to create a customized LLM. This model, specialized in creating personalized emails, was deployed and tested seamlessly, exceeding our expectations."

Selecton Technologies' Game-Changing AI Assistant for Gamers

Yevgen Lopatin, Selecton's co-founder, articulated their experience during the LLM Hackathon sprint, saying: “The sprint provided us with valuable GPU resources to validate our solution. During a one-day training session, we fine-tuned the Dolly LLM model using the LORA training script on an Intel® Data Center MAX 1100 GPU with 48 GB VRAM. With the availability of the LLM platform, we explored uncharted territories in computational capacity, achieving exceptional results.” 

Terrain Analytics' Deep Learning Advancements

Using Intel hardware, Terrain can now efficiently scale Deep Learning/Language Learning Models (DL/LLMs) without facing computational constraints. As Terrain Analytics' data scientist Nathan Berkley says: “Both of the models I made had better success metrics than the ones I built with OpenAI’s Ada model, and were 15x faster to run”. Once these models are fine-tuned, it will be possible to correctly classify job titles that are currently unclassified. Terrain will then be able to map these to their other datasets and build a feature that their users have been asking for.

Beewant: Thriving in Intel's Ecosystem

Ahmed Joudad, CEO of Beewant, expressed the value of being part of Intel's ecosystem, which has been instrumental in the rapid development of their solution. "One of the best aspects of the program (Intel® Liftoff) was having the ability to interact with other startups. Over and above the hardware and the experience of the team, we benefited from being part of the whole ecosystem. We’ve been able to develop the Beewant solution so quickly in large part because the ecosystem works so well." 

Argilla's Strategic Development through Expert Guidance

David Berenstein from Argilla acknowledges the program's role in refining their training processes and aligning their development strategies with industry best practices. “Joining the program was a pivotal decision for Argilla. Over the past six months, we've benefited immensely from the expert guidance and industry insights provided by Intel's seasoned professionals. The program's hands-on approach, combined with regular office hours and meetups, has been instrumental in refining our training processes and aligning our development strategies with industry best practices." 

Celebrating Success at Intel® Innovation 2023

Daniel Whitenack, founder of Prediction Guard, shared his thoughts on the event's impact: "What a great event! First off, we were able to meet other innovative AI startups in the Intel® Liftoff program, along with Intel engineers who have helped us deploy our product on Intel® Habana® Gaudi2®. It was so great to deepen those relationships for future collaboration. We were also able to demo Prediction Guard running on Gaudi2 in Intel® Developer Cloud. Intel® Liftoff startup program made it possible for us to be the first product on a new cloud offering and demo that in the CTO's keynote. Something I will never forget!" 

If you're an early-stage startup in accelerated computing, AI, ML, and Data Science/Analytics, and looking to improve your tech and scale your business, consider applying to Intel® Liftoff.