Since launching earlier this yr, Lex Inc. has achieved spectacular development, securing practically $3 million in seed funding and amassing greater than 200,000 customers on its synthetic intelligence-powered phrase processing and copy-editing platform.
The Woodland Hills-based firm initially spun out of one other startup referred to as Each Media Inc. that was based by Lex chief govt Nathan Baschez. Each Media publishes every day newsletters about enterprise and know-how.
Baschez initially launched Lex as a aspect venture final October, and the platform noticed 25,000 customers enroll on its very first day. Customers can kind essays, weblog posts, grant proposals or any textual content of their alternative into Lex’s phrase processor, simply as they’d into Google Drive. The distinction with Lex is the flexibility to name on its AI engine utilizing pure language to critique writing, sum up paragraphs, provide tonal adjustments and extra.
“I believe the best factor about Lex proper now’s the way in which you could chat with AI within the feedback,” Baschez stated.
Baschez partially attributes the preliminary spike of person sign-ups to some folks having Lex, which is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 language fashions, as their first expertise with generative AI. Probably the most fascinating factor about Lex’s know-how, in accordance with Baschez, is the way in which the person can talk with the AI as they’d collaborate with a coworker on Google Drive. Whereas OpenAI’s personal ChatGPT mannequin can provide suggestions on writing and copy-editing companies, Baschez stated he feels it doesn’t give trustworthy, actionable help.
“ChatGPT’s AI is approach too simple on you … it simply form of desires to say, ‘you probably did superior, right here’s a gold star,’” Baschez stated. “I spent quite a lot of time form of experimenting to try to get (Lex) to concentrate to the precise issues, to offer sufficient direct, actual suggestions, like the sort {that a} good editor would give.”
Lex can provide prompts to get issues began or make particular edits resembling whether or not extra context is required in sure sections or how the tone of the piece might be modified. The person can tailor the AI’s focus by choosing what mode of writing they’re utilizing, together with choices resembling music lyrics, article writing or tutorial essays. Baschez stated that he has seen a considerable variety of Lex customers use its AI to put in writing marketing-oriented weblog posts or inventive texts like quick tales, however that he has been significantly shocked by the quantity of grant proposals being written with Lex.
“That was one which I threw in simply form of out of curiosity, nevertheless it’s far more fashionable than I’d have thought,” Baschez stated. “Its (typical utilization) is actually fairly broad for now, and that is likely one of the massive issues that we’re engaged on.”
The $2.75 million seed funding spherical was led by True Ventures, and the corporate stated a few of these funds will go in the direction of hiring extra engineers to broaden Lex’s companies. Lex’s chief of workers Jiarui Wang works as a contractor, and Baschez is presently the corporate’s single full-time worker.
One in every of Baschez’s massive targets is develop a complete “monitor adjustments” software the place Lex could make instructed edits to a doc or textual content, and customers can monitor the instructed edits and approve or deny its revisions. OpenAI costs about 3 cents for each 1,000 prompts generated by GPT-4 and Lex is free to customers as long as their utilization prices lower than $20 per day in AI costs. Baschez stated that this “restrict” may be very excessive and that he plans to roll out a paid subscription tier with near-unlimited entry later this yr, which might assist offset the prices of licensing OpenAI’s merchandise to energy Lex.
Originally posted 2023-09-11 07:01:00.