AI21 Labs launches AI21 Studio and the 178B-parameter Jurassic-1

Background

AI21 Labs, an Israeli company, offered its own models to outside developers through this launch. A developer platform is a set of tools, documentation and access points that lets programmers build products on top of a model without training one themselves.

What happened

In August 2021 AI21 Labs launched AI21 Studio and its Jurassic-1 language models ^[2][1]. The announcement, dated 4 August 2021, presented the two together ^[1]. The company's own description of the largest model is that it was the largest and most sophisticated language model then released for general use by developers ^[1].

Key details

The largest model, Jurassic-1 Jumbo, has 178 billion parameters ^[1]. Parameters are the adjustable numbers that store what a model has learned, so the count is a rough guide to the model's size. A model of this scale needs substantial computing power to run.

The models use a vocabulary of about 250,000 tokens. AI21 said this was at least five times larger than most existing vocabularies, and that it included multi-word tokens such as phrases and named entities ^[1]. A larger vocabulary lets common multi-word expressions be handled as single units instead of being split into many small pieces.

AI21 Studio opened as a public beta that anyone could join ^[1]. Developers could use the models through an API or a web playground ^[1].

Impact

The launch made AI21's models available to developers beyond the company, and gave it a product line that later included the Jurassic-2 models and the Jamba family. The entry records the launch and the figures AI21 gave at the time. Later pricing and model changes are described in the entries for those models. An open beta is an early public version that anyone may join, so that users can try a product before it is fully finished.