Google AI leads among latest investors in Australian AI pioneer’s new startup

Australian AI entrepreneur Jeremy Howard has capped an US$8 million ($12.2 million) angel investment round for his latest startup, Answer.AI. Among those participating in the round, which closed overnight, were the co-leads of Google’s Gemini AI, Oriol Vinyals and Jeff Dean.

Founded by Brisbane-based Howard and The Lean Startup author Eric Ries, Answer.AI is a research and development lab that hopes to do for AI what Thomas Edison’s invention lab did for electricity.

“Our role models here are the early electricity hackers, people successfully applying electricity at a point when its utility was pretty much as unknown as AI is today,” Howard said. “Everyone’s gone chatbot crazy, but we’re interested in building things other than chatbots.”

In addition to Google’s Gemini leads, other participants in the investment round included Meta's head of generative AI product management and the founders of several unicorn startups including Hugging Face, Cohere and Together AI. It's the second round for Answer.AI, following an initial US$10 million injection last December from Palo Alto-based Decibel.