Since launching earlier this yr, Lex Inc. has achieved spectacular progress, securing practically $3 million in seed funding and amassing greater than 200,000 customers on its synthetic intelligence-powered phrase processing and copy-editing platform.
The Woodland Hills-based firm initially spun out of one other startup known as Each Media Inc. that was based by Lex chief govt Nathan Baschez. Each Media publishes every day newsletters about enterprise and know-how.
Baschez initially launched Lex as a aspect venture final October, and the platform noticed 25,000 customers enroll on its very first day. Customers can sort essays, weblog posts, grant proposals or any textual content of their selection into Lex’s phrase processor, simply as they’d into Google Drive. The distinction with Lex is the flexibility to name on its AI engine utilizing pure language to critique writing, sum up paragraphs, supply tonal adjustments and extra.
“I feel the best factor about Lex proper now could be the way in which that you would be able to chat with AI within the feedback,” Baschez mentioned.
Baschez partially attributes the preliminary spike of consumer sign-ups to some folks having Lex, which is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 language fashions, as their first expertise with generative AI. Essentially the most attention-grabbing factor about Lex’s know-how, in response to Baschez, is the way in which the consumer can talk with the AI as they’d collaborate with a coworker on Google Drive. Whereas OpenAI’s personal ChatGPT mannequin can supply suggestions on writing and copy-editing providers, Baschez mentioned he feels it doesn’t give sincere, actionable help.
“ChatGPT’s AI is method too straightforward on you … it simply type of needs to say, ‘you probably did superior, right here’s a gold star,’” Baschez mentioned. “I spent loads of time type of experimenting to attempt to get (Lex) to concentrate to the best issues, to offer sufficient direct, actual suggestions, like the sort {that a} good editor would give.”
Lex can supply prompts to get issues began or make particular edits reminiscent of whether or not extra context is required in sure sections or how the tone of the piece could possibly be modified. The consumer can tailor the AI’s focus by deciding on what mode of writing they’re utilizing, together with choices reminiscent of tune lyrics, article writing or tutorial essays. Baschez mentioned that he has seen a considerable variety of Lex customers use its AI to write down marketing-oriented weblog posts or artistic texts like quick tales, however that he has been notably shocked by the quantity of grant proposals being written with Lex.
“That was one which I threw in simply type of out of curiosity, nevertheless it’s rather more common than I might have thought,” Baschez mentioned. “Its (typical utilization) is truthfully fairly broad for now, and that is without doubt one of the large issues that we’re engaged on.”
The $2.75 million seed funding spherical was led by True Ventures, and the corporate mentioned a few of these funds will go in direction of hiring extra engineers to broaden Lex’s providers. Lex’s chief of employees Jiarui Wang works as a contractor, and Baschez is presently the corporate’s single full-time worker.
Certainly one of Baschez’s large objectives is develop a complete “monitor adjustments” software the place Lex could make urged edits to a doc or textual content, and customers can monitor the urged edits and approve or deny its revisions. OpenAI prices about 3 cents for each 1,000 prompts generated by GPT-4 and Lex is free to customers as long as their utilization prices lower than $20 per day in AI prices. Baschez mentioned that this “restrict” could be very excessive and that he plans to roll out a paid subscription tier with near-unlimited entry later this yr, which might assist offset the prices of licensing OpenAI’s merchandise to energy Lex.
