There’s been a bunch of exciting research-focused AI labs popping up in recent months, and Flapping Airplanes is one of the most interesting. Propelled by its young and curious founders, Flapping Airplanes is focused on finding less data-hungry ways to train AI. It’s a potential game-changer for the economics and capabilities of AI models — and with $180 million in seed funding, they’ll have plenty of runway to figure it out.
Last week, I spoke with the lab’s three co-founders — brothers Ben and Asher Spector, and Aidan Smith — about why this is an exciting moment to start a new AI lab and why they keep coming back to ideas about the human brain.
I want to start by asking, why now? Labs like OpenAI and DeepMind have spent so much on scaling their models. I’m sure the competition seems daunting. Why did this feel like a good moment to launch a foundation model company?
Ben: There’s just so much to do. So, the advances that we’ve gotten over the last five to ten years have been spectacular. We love the tools. We use them every day. But the question is, is this the whole universe of things that needs to happen? And we thought about it very carefully and our answer was no, there’s a lot more to do. In our case, we thought that the data efficiency problem was sort of really the key thing to go look at. The current frontier models are trained on the sum totality of human knowledge, and humans can obviously make do with an awful lot less. So there’s a big gap there, and it’s worth understanding.
What we’re doing is really a concentrated bet on three things. It’s a bet that this data efficiency problem is the important thing to be doing. Like, this is really a direction th …