The Scoop
New York-based AI startup millionways on Thursday launched its new AI model that claims to offer insight into human intent and motivations.
The company also told Semafor it has raised $6 million in US funding, with investors including football stars Jason Kelce and DK Metcalf.
The Thorsten-4 model was born out of a research project in Germany in which dozens of psychologists interviewed more than 7,000 people about their personal lives and aspirations. That data — which the psychologists labeled by hand to capture what people’s words revealed about their motives and thinking — was used to train the model.
Millionways cofounders Martin Cordsmeier and Max Weidemann argue that understanding is missing from regular AI models, which are trained on internet text. They see the model as particularly useful in sales and executive hiring, where a search firm could prompt it to evaluate an interview transcript to gauge how a candidate will behave under pressure.
“We can add a level of human understanding that the language models cannot get to by themselves,” Weidemann said, adding that the model should be “a decision-making support tool rather than the ultimate decision-maker.”
J.D.’s view
Enterprises are increasingly injecting task- and industry-specific models into their tech stacks, rather than defaulting to the frontier models for every task.
