Together has secured a $20M seed funding round led by Lux Capital, supporting its mission to empower innovation and creativity through open-source generative AI models and a cloud platform. The company aims to provide leading alternatives to closed systems, enabling an open ecosystem for AI. With the backing of prominent investors including venture funds and entrepreneurs, Together plans to release projects that have garnered support from hundreds of thousands of AI developers, such as GPT-JT, OpenChatKit, and RedPajama. The platform leverages research in distributed optimization to efficiently scale training and inference, with plans to open up access to its cloud platform in the coming months. This marks the beginning of a new era of AI, where open models will give developers greater ability to understand, inspect, and utilize AI without vendor lock-in and with strong privacy protections.