LM Arena, a crowdsourced benchmarking venture that main AI labs depend on to check and market their AI fashions, has raised $100 million in a seed funding spherical that values the group at $600 million, based on Bloomberg.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and UC Investments, which manages an funding portfolio for the University of California, led the fundraising. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins additionally participated.
Founded in 2023, LM Arena has change into one thing of an AI trade obsession. Primarily run by UC Berkeley-affiliated researchers, LM Arena has partnered with firms reminiscent of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to make flagship fashions obtainable for its group to guage.
LM Arena was beforehand funded by means of a mix of grants and donations, together with from Google’s Kaggle knowledge science platform, a16z, and Together AI. Recently, it’s been accused by some researchers of serving to prime AI labs recreation its leaderboard — accusations that LM Arena has vehemently denied.
