LightOn

LightOn is a France-based organization that develops optical processing units (OPU) designed for large-scale machine-learning applications and to improve data processing for AI. The technology is licensed by PSL Research University and was originally developed at Paris’ research institutions. 

Several users from industry and academia have seen positive results on the hybrid CPU/GPU/OPU server, outperforming silicon-only computing technology in a variety of large-scale machine-learning tasks. 

LightOn provides four main solutions:

Model Factory: Specialized in creating large language models (LLMs) from 1 billion–100 billion parameters and creating new models or fine-tuning existing models to serve the requirements of the clients. The models developed are multilingual, supporting a range of European languages, such as English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch. The users are able to gather feedback through LightOn’s RLHF pipeline and incorporate it into the model progressively. It is claimed that LightOn’s codebase enables faster model training by 25%.

Paradigm & Task Factory: Paradigm is a platform built to integrate GenAI into workflows. It facilitates users to create, evaluate, iterate on prompts, and fine-tune models with a prompt/model list and seamlessly integrate with any open-source solution or company solution. The comprehensive dashboard enables users to monitor performance and usage while creating and managing user accounts, permissions, and API keys. Paradigm offers a ready-go-to list of tasks that the company can use to automate repetitive tasks. The development tools are compatible with Langchain and GPT index.

Chat with docs: Users can convert the document database into an interactive chatbot that enables them to get answers in real-time without the need to search for documents and obtain insights white maintaining privacy.

LightOn offers three plans catered to different requirements of the user:

Business: SaaS that provides 100,000 completions per month and API

Enterprise: Private cloud infrastructure that provides an unlimited number of conversions, API, and fine-tuning

Enterprise+: On-premise infrastructure that provides an unlimited number of conversions, API, and fine-tuning

Key customers and partnerships

In November 2023 , CGG and LightOn, an AI company, collaborated to utilize CGG's high-performance computing (HPC) solutions for evaluating and testing LLMs in support of industrial AI deployment.

In June 2023, LightOn collaborated with Aleia to launch an industrial AI solution in Fall 2023. The partnership integrates LightOn’s GPT models and the Paradigm platform expertise with Aleia’s industrial architecture, focusing on providing a robust infrastructure for AI model deployment. 

In December 2022, LightOn and Amazon Web Services (AWS) collaborated to facilitate easy access and deployment of Lyra-Fr, the largest French-language model, within the AWS SageMaker environment. 

Funding and financials In December 2018, LightOn secured USD 3.3 million in a seed funding round led by Quantonation and Anorak. The funds were utilized to support the development of LightOn’s optics-based hardware technology.