Humans& Pioneers AI Coordination to Revolutionize Team Collaboration
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, a new startup named Humans& is making significant strides by focusing on enhancing AI’s role in team coordination and collaboration. Founded by a team of experts from leading AI organizations such as Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, Humans& has recently secured a substantial $480 million seed funding to develop a foundation model architecture centered on social intelligence.
The Evolution of AI: From Assistants to Coordinators
Traditional AI chatbots have excelled in tasks like answering queries, summarizing documents, and solving mathematical problems. However, their capabilities have largely been limited to assisting individual users. They are not inherently designed to manage the complexities of real-world collaboration, such as coordinating among team members with diverse priorities, tracking ongoing decisions, and maintaining team alignment over extended periods.
Humans& aims to bridge this gap by developing AI systems that can function as a central nervous system for the human-plus-AI economy. This involves creating models that not only process information but also understand and facilitate human interactions within teams.
A New Paradigm: Social Intelligence in AI
The core of Humans&’s initiative is to build AI models that possess social intelligence. Unlike existing models focused on information retrieval or code generation, these new models are designed to comprehend and navigate the nuances of human communication and collaboration. This shift represents a significant departure from the first wave of AI adoption, which primarily emphasized scaling question-answering models for specific verticals.
Andi Peng, a co-founder of Humans& and former employee at Anthropic, highlighted this transition:
It feels like we’re ending the first paradigm of scaling, where question-answering models were trained to be very smart at particular verticals, and now we’re entering what we believe to be the second wave of adoption where the average consumer or user is trying to figure out what to do with all these things.
Addressing the Coordination Challenge
As companies shift from utilizing chat-based AI to deploying AI agents, the challenge of coordination becomes increasingly apparent. While current models demonstrate competence in isolated tasks, integrating them into cohesive workflows remains a hurdle. Humans& seeks to address this by developing AI systems capable of managing and facilitating complex team dynamics.
Eric Zelikman, co-founder and CEO of Humans& and former researcher at xAI, elaborated on the company’s focus:
We are building a product and a model that is centered on communication and collaboration… the focus is on getting the product to help people work together and communicate more effectively — both with each other and with AI tools.
This approach aims to alleviate the time-consuming processes often associated with group decision-making, such as aligning on project goals or design choices.
Potential Applications and Future Prospects
Although Humans& is still in its early stages and has not yet released a product, the team envisions applications that could replace or enhance existing multi-user platforms like communication tools (e.g., Slack) or collaboration platforms (e.g., Google Docs and Notion). The potential use cases span both enterprise and consumer markets, indicating a broad scope for the technology’s impact.
The substantial seed funding reflects strong confidence in Humans&’s vision and the expertise of its founding team. As the company progresses, it aims to redefine the role of AI in collaborative environments, moving beyond the narrative of AI as a job threat to positioning it as an empowering tool for human teams.
Conclusion
Humans& is at the forefront of a transformative movement in artificial intelligence, focusing on developing models that enhance human collaboration through social intelligence. By addressing the coordination challenges inherent in team dynamics, the company seeks to unlock new potentials for AI in the workplace. As this technology evolves, it holds the promise of reshaping how teams interact and work together, marking a significant milestone in the integration of AI into our daily professional lives.
