Poolside Raises $500 Million to Drive Progress Toward AGI

Poolside, an AI research company, has announced a significant milestone with a $500 million fundraising round aimed at advancing the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The company believes this funding will help drive progress in scaling AI capabilities to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

A Vision for AGI and Beyond

Poolside views AGI as one of the key frontiers of the 21st century, alongside space exploration and energy. According to Poolside, AGI has the potential to surpass human intelligence, reshaping industries, scientific progress, and how we approach global challenges. They envision AI eventually performing the majority of economically valuable work, with the primary limitations being compute and energy resources.

The company sees this moment as a pivotal point in history, where AI technology will reach new heights, building on the rapid technological advancements of the past century.

Research Focus: AI’s Role in Software Development

Poolside’s research into AGI focuses on AI’s potential to drive efficiencies in software development, which they see as one of the first economically impactful applications. Despite AI’s current capabilities, Poolside acknowledges that AI systems require significantly more data than humans to learn effectively. While there is ample data for tasks like language understanding, other capabilities remain constrained by data availability.

The company has developed a novel technique called Reinforcement Learning from Code Execution Feedback (RLCEF) to enhance AI’s ability to learn from real-world tasks. By training their models on millions of tasks across 130,000 of real-world codebases, Poolside aims to scale AI’s ability to develop and improve its coding and reasoning capabilities. The company has scaled its training infrastructure to 10,000 GPUs with the new funding, allowing them to advance both RLCEF and overall model training.

Building a Sustainable Economic Model

In addition to their research goals, Poolside is focused on building a sustainable economic engine that will support the future of AGI development. The company’s dual approach includes both the “capabilities race” — advancing talent, compute, research, and data — and the “go-to-market race,” which involves product development and market distribution.

Early customers are currently testing Poolside’s product in complex, high-stakes environments, such as large enterprises that prioritize privacy and security. These enterprises employ thousands of developers and manage vast amounts of sensitive data. The company aims to refine its AI models through these real-world applications before eventually making their software-building technology accessible to a broader audience.

Expanding Access to Software Development

One of Poolside’s long-term goals is to democratize software development, making it accessible to anyone, regardless of their coding expertise. The company believes this shift will unlock a new wave of creativity, allowing more people to contribute to solving global challenges. Poolside draws parallels between this upcoming “supercycle” and previous technological leaps, such as the advent of electricity, the internet, and smartphones, all of which significantly improved quality of life.

By making AI-driven software development tools more accessible, Poolside hopes to empower individuals worldwide to build technology that addresses real-world problems, even without traditional coding skills.

Looking Ahead

With its latest funding round, Poolside is poised to accelerate its research and product development on the path toward AGI. The company plans to share updates on its progress, products, and behind-the-scenes stories from its global team as they continue tackling the challenges of AGI development.

Poolside invites individuals who resonate with their mission and values to join their team in building the future of AGI. You can visit their careers page.