OpenAI Acquires Team from AI Recommendation Startup Crossing Minds

OpenAI hires team behind AI recommendation startup Crossing Minds | TechCrunch

Crossing Minds, a startup that provides AI recommendation systems to e-commerce businesses, said on Thursday that its team is joining OpenAI. The startup was backed by Index Ventures, Shopify, Plug and Play, and Radical Ventures, and had raised more than $13.5 million across multiple rounds, according to Crunchbase. Crossing Minds largely worked with e-commerce companies to improve their personalization and recommendation systems. The company claims it studies customers' on-site behavior data to gather insights on their shopping preferences without compromising privacy. "Joining OpenAI allows us to bring our work -- and our values -- into a mission we deeply respect: to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We're thrilled to bring our experience and energy to a team that's setting the direction for the future of AI. We're excited to learn, to contribute, and to help shape what's next," the startup's co-founders wrote in a post on its website. Alexandre Robicquet, one of the co-founders, has updated his bio on LinkedIn, which now reads "Research, Post-training and Agents at OpenAI." It is not clear if all of Crossing Minds' team is joining OpenAI. Crossing Minds' website also says that the company won't take up any more clients. Per its archived "About" page, Crossing Mind previously said it was trusted by Intuit, Anthropic, Udacity and Chanel. AI companies have built a plethora of tools to help customers shop. Google and Perplexity have launched AI features to improve recommendations, while startups like Daydream have received massive investments to launch AI shopping assistants. Earlier this year, OpenAI updated ChatGPT to provide recommendations, images, and reviews for items its users ask questions about. OpenAI didn't immediately return a request for comment.

OpenAI hires staff of Shopify-backed AI startup Crossing Minds - SiliconANGLE

OpenAI hires staff of Shopify-backed AI startup Crossing Minds OpenAI has hired the team behind venture-backed artificial intelligence startup Crossing Minds Inc., TechCrunch reported today. Crossing Minds confirmed the deal in an update on its website without disclosing the financial terms. The company previously raised more than $13 million in funding from Shopify Inc., Index Ventures and other backers. Crossing Minds was launched in 2016 by a team that included prominent AI researcher Sebastian Thrun. He earlier co-founded online education platform Udacity Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s X product research lab. Crossing Minds' two other co-founders, Emile Contal and Alexandre Robicquet, are also AI researchers. According to TechCrunch, Robicquet has joined OpenAI in a research role. His work will encompass AI agents and post-training, a phase of the AI development process that focuses on enhancing model output quality. Post-training is an important element of the workflow through which reasoning models are developed. It's unclear how many of Crossing Minds' other team members are joining OpenAI. There's also no word on whether the ChatGPT developer has acquired the company's technology, or whether it plans to make the technology available to users. Before the deal, Crossing Minds offered an AI-powered product recommendation system for online retailers. It automatically generated shopping suggestions based on data such as a customer's past purchases. According to Crossing Minds, the neural networks that power the software were developed using a custom version of gradient descent, a popular AI training method. The company also offered two tools designed to ease the task of building AI applications. The first tool was built to generate embeddings, the data structures in which AI neural networks keep information. The technical specifications of those data structures vary based on the information they contain. An embedding that holds a complex code snippet, for example, is likely to require more RAM than one that stores a product description. Crossing Minds says that its tool generates embeddings optimized for data such as consumer shopping preferences. Crossing Minds' second developer tool is called RAGSys. It's designed to ease the task of equipping AI applications with RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation, features. Crossing Minds says that the software works with off-the-shelf large language models from multiple AI providers, including OpenAI.

AI talent war: OpenAI acquihires the team behind Crossing Minds - The Economic Times

Backed by the likes of Index Ventures, Shopify, Plug and Play, and Radical Ventures, the AI startup has raised more than $13.5 million across multiple rounds.OpenAI hired the team behind Crossing Minds, a startup known for providing AI-powered recommendations for ecommerce businesses, on Friday. Founded in 2017 by AI researchers Alexandre Robicquet, Emile Contal, and Google X founder Sebastian Thrun, Crossing Minds is headquartered in San Francisco. The company announced that the entire team would now work with OpenAI to build on existing AI capabilities. "Joining OpenAI allows us to bring our work -- and our values -- into a mission we deeply respect: to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We're thrilled to bring our experience and energy to a team that's setting the direction for the future of AI," the Crossing Minds cofounders wrote in a statement. Backed by the likes of Index Ventures, Shopify, Plug and Play, and Radical Ventures, the AI startup has raised more than $13.5 million across multiple rounds as per a report by TechCrunch. The development came after OpenAI recently decided to buy Jony Ive's AI devices startup io in an all-equity deal for $6.4 billion, including its current stake in the company. io is OpenAI's largest acquisition so far and came soon after it agreed to buy Windsurf, an artificial intelligence-assisted coding tool, for about $3 billion. In 2024, OpenAI acquired search and database analytics startup Rockset to provide better infrastructure for its enterprise products. The previous year, OpenAI had acquired digital products company Global Illumination.