AI21 Labs releases Jurassic-2

Background

AI21 Labs had earlier launched its first Jurassic models, Jurassic-1, together with the AI21 Studio developer platform. By early 2023 the company was preparing a second generation of models, and it was also offering task-focused interfaces so developers did not need to write general prompts for common jobs. A task-specific API is an interface built for one kind of job, such as summarising a document or correcting grammar. A prompt is the text a user gives a model as an instruction or question. General prompts require the user to phrase each request from scratch, whereas a task-specific interface fixes the job in advance.

What happened

On 9 March 2023 AI21 Labs announced Jurassic-2 and a set of Task-Specific APIs ^[1]. The announcement covered both the models and the interfaces built on them, which were released at the same time.

Key details

The models come in Large, Grande and Jumbo sizes, with instruction-following versions of Grande and Jumbo ^[1]. Besides English, they support Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch ^[1].

In its own evaluation AI21 said that J2 Jumbo ranked second on Stanford's HELM benchmark ^[1]. The ranking came from the company's testing, and readers should treat it as AI21's claim. HELM, short for Holistic Evaluation of Language Models, is a benchmark that tests language models across many tasks and scenarios.

All J2 models were free to use until 1 May 2023 ^[1]. After that date the pricing changed, as recorded in the Jurassic-2 model entry.

The Task-Specific APIs covered paraphrasing, summarisation and grammar correction. They launched with the Wordtune API ^[1]. Wordtune was AI21's own writing assistant, so the APIs gave developers access to the same kind of writing tools.

Impact

The announcement marked a move from general-purpose models toward interfaces for specific writing tasks. It also set up the next step in the family. Later models are covered in their own entries.