AI21 Labs

AI21 Labs was founded in Tel Aviv in 2017 by Stanford professor Yoav Shoham, Ori Goshen and Amnon Shashua, better known as the founder of Mobileye. Its first product was the writing assistant Wordtune in 2020. A year later came Jurassic-1, which at 178 billion parameters was one of the largest publicly available language models of its day, edging past GPT-3.

It made the most noise with Jamba in 2024, which interleaves Transformer layers with Mamba layers and mixture-of-experts. The idea is that attention layers provide precision while the state space layers keep memory in check, which bought a 256,000-token context window on a single GPU. The company has since focused on enterprise customers rather than consumer chatbots.