Featherless AI, founded in 2023, operates a serverless inference platform designed to provide instant access to open-source AI models. The platform's core technology enables model changes, or hot-swapping, in under five seconds, a capability that distinguishes it in the AI infrastructure space. It offers access to over 20,000 open-source models.
The company's work spans several technical domains including AI inference, serverless computing, model optimization, and post-transformer model research. A key focus is on dramatically reducing the cost of running AI models; the platform claims to deliver over 100x reduction in inference costs. The company also engages in research into architectures beyond the transformer, citing examples where alternative approaches could make inference for large models 1,000x cheaper.
Featherless AI positions its platform for the AI development, research, and software development sectors. The company emphasizes an open-source focus, aiming to serve a global community of developers, researchers, and startups by removing barriers to accessing and deploying advanced AI models.