Interested in anyone who knows about this company (they have a lot of ML hiring listings right now). Basically wondering if it's worth exploring more. They have apparently raised $240mln and are a unicorn so this is an important topic.
Here is the summary of some red flags I have found:
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Founders have no ML background
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Zero released product after several years despite huge funding.
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TC article says founded 2021, but every listing claims it is YC2017. One of the founders did a recruiting service from YC 2017, but Imbue is a totally unrelated company with a different founding group so claiming YC affiliation seems dubious/unethical. YC is also not named as an investor in the company anywhere on their website.
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No-one I have spoken to has ever worked with them/ heard of them outside press
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Claim to have raised $240mln, but not clear who from. Named investors on recent $200mln round are "Astera Institute, NVIDIA, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, Notion co-founder Simon Last and others" which seems like a random group and there is no named lead. As a matter of fact, there is not a single VC named anywhere in their marketing as an investor which would be very unusual for a SF AI startup that has raised >$200mln. Crunchbase also has no VCs/institutional investors recorded. I couldn't find any investor that I would expect to have done significant due diligence. A month after they raised $200mln, they prominently announced that they raised another $12mln from Amazon Alexa and Eric Schmidt - this seems like a pure publicity stunt to me. This announcement of an extra 5% in round funding got a bunch of press articles about it also. They push the press angle incredibly hard.
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Their CEO has been in the press claiming that they buy their own chips, and they also claim to have a 10k H100 stack, but they literally haven't raised enough funding to buy that many H100s. Maybe they are renting and all the press about buying is just press?
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The press/publicity to product ratio is extremely high. Dozens of articles in major publications with nothing released and no claimed customers.
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Their site is full of gushy statements with no detail like "We pretrain very large (>100B parameter) models, optimized for internal reasoning benchmarks." (internal reasoning benchmarks is a great way to pretend you have competitive models!) and "Our north star: truly personal computers that give us freedom, dignity, and agency to do what we love". As far as I can tell, Imbue has never released even a 3B or 7B open source model like a bunch of similar startups have.
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Their "Our Work" blog that should showcase their research and products contains 4 articles from 2023. 2 of them are opinion pieces on LLM ethics that contain no technical details, 1 is a niche piece on RL in hyperparameter search, and 1 discusses SSL on ResNet50 - a 23mln param CNN that is 5,000 times smaller than the LLMs they are apparently training.
Of course red flags are just that - suggestions of a problem not evidence. Inflection is in a similar boat on many of the above points - their only public product is the inferior Pi model - but at least they have serious industry heavyweights in their management and research so I give them the benefit of the doubt.
So, to those in the know - is this a real company? Has it duped a bunch of rich individuals? Is it worth spending more time on?
what did their interview process consist of?
By pass, I mean I decided not to move forward with the interview.
The link to their interview process is on all of their JDs; it’s a Notion page. I can link it later if you don’t find it