Magic AI – a San Francisco-based startup – announced it raised $117 million in Series B funding for further developing its advanced AI system aimed at automating software development. The funding round was led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross’s NFDG Ventures, with additional participation from CapitalG and Elad Gil. This funding round brought Magic’s total funding to date to over $145 million.
Launched in 2022 by Eric Steinberger and Sebastian De Ro, this startup is carving out a niche by focusing on developing an AI software engineer capable of assisting with complex coding tasks and this will act more as a coworker than merely a “copilot” tool.
The company founders believe that in addition to boosting practical coding productivity, advancing intelligent code generation tools can provide a path toward more expansive artificial general intelligence. And their vision even extends to the creation of broadly capable AGI systems that align with human values – ones that are able to accelerate global progress by assisting with humanity’s most complex challenges. The company’s $23 million Series A round last summer was a major step towards this ambitious goal.
Central to Magic’s technical strategy is handling exceptionally large context windows. And last year, they unveiled their Long-term Memory Network (LTM Net) architecture and corresponding LTM-1 model with a 5 million context window. Most language models operate on limited contexts, commonly less than 32k tokens. OpenAI’s powerful GPT-4 Turbo model is 128k tokens and Anthropic’s Claude 2.1 is 200k. But models with much larger context windows are on the horizon. For example, Google recently announced that their new Gemini 1.5 model will have a 1 million context window, and shared that they have tested up to 10 million context lengths in research.
The larger context capacities allow for more nuanced code comprehension, enabling Magic’s model to reason over entire repositories and dependency trees to boost usefulness.
With this funding round in hand, talent recruitment and retention is clearly top of mind for Magic AI’s leadership. And the startup is actively seeking talented individuals who share its vision of integrity and innovation and is placing a strong emphasis on cultivating a supportive culture rooted in passion.
