Ask-AI raises $9 million for AI that can comprehend excruciatingly long documents

The platform can process a wide range of corporate data sources, from manuals to guides to customer feedback, and learn them all well enough to answer most questions

Artificial intelligence isn't quite ready to launch an anti-human revolt, but it's getting pretty good at figuring out what people mean when they ask stupid questions.

Ask-AI just finished a $9 million funding round for its platform, which is a program that reads and understands large business documents, manuals, and databases and lets users just type in a search query to get an answer to their exact question. It is one of the latest products to take advantage of this new ability.

If you've ever needed an answer to a specific question about a broad subject within a thousand-page document, you'll understand why this is a big deal. Today's businesses are inundated with information and data from numerous internal and external sources, as well as a plethora of text-heavy communication channels. " Employees spend a significant amount of time searching for information and summarizing and categorizing customer communications. Alon Talmor, the founder and CEO of Ask-AI, said, "Our platform wants to be like Google in that it gives direct answers from the web, but in the business world."

The platform can process a wide range of corporate data sources, from manuals to guides to customer feedback sources, and learn them all well enough to answer most, if not all, questions. 

The company was only founded at the end of 2021, but it has already attracted several clients who have been so impressed with Ask-platform AI that they have been spreading it around to others before it even officially launched.

"One of our larger portfolio companies is a design partner and paying customer of Ask, and it has expanded the use of the product to many dozens of users even before it was officially launched," said Yanai Oron, managing partner at Vertex Ventures, one of the leaders of the recent funding round.

Capabilities based on Natural Language Processing 

Natural language processing enables Ask-AI to generate answers based on naturally phrased human queries. NLP has made significant progress in recent years as researchers discover new ways to train AIs with larger and more complex language models, teaching them how to analyze how people communicate.

"NLP appears inherently linked to AI progress because it captures complex human thinking," said Yoav Shoham, a computer science professor at Stanford, founder of the Artificial Intelligence Index, and co-founder and co-CEO of AI21 Labs, a company that uses artificial intelligence language models to change how people read and write.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Shoham explained that the NLP rubber has hit the road in the last half-decade, resulting in rapid advances in the way computers understand people.

"Until about five years ago, there wasn't much progress in natural language processing." There was progress, but all of the benchmarks were plodding along and didn't even come close to human-level performance," he said. 

The only limit on a future computer's ability to understand us may now be the sky, thanks to more advanced neural net architecture. "Natural language is the lens into the human mind, because nothing is as subtle and complex," Shoham said. Understanding text is really understanding thinking. "