team collaboration AI News & Updates
Humans& Raises $480M to Build Foundation Model for AI-Powered Team Coordination
Humans&, a startup founded by former employees of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, has raised a $480 million seed round to develop a foundation model focused on social intelligence and team coordination rather than traditional chatbot capabilities. The company plans to build a new model architecture trained using long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning to enable AI systems that can coordinate people, manage group decisions, and serve as connective tissue across organizations. The startup aims to create both the model and product interface together, positioning itself as a coordination layer rather than a plugin for existing collaboration tools.
Skynet Chance (+0.04%): Multi-agent AI systems with social intelligence and coordination capabilities could increase risks of emergent behaviors and collective AI autonomy that are harder to predict or control than single-agent systems. The focus on AI systems that mediate human decisions and organizational coordination also increases dependency on AI for critical social functions.
Skynet Date (-1 days): Development of novel multi-agent RL architectures and social intelligence models represents a new frontier that could accelerate capabilities in autonomous coordination, though the early-stage nature and focus on human-AI collaboration rather than pure autonomy provides some moderating influence. The substantial funding enables faster research progress in this previously underexplored area.
AGI Progress (+0.03%): The focus on social intelligence, long-horizon planning, and multi-agent coordination addresses key AGI capabilities beyond current chatbot limitations, representing progress toward more general intelligence that can navigate complex social and collaborative contexts. Training models to understand motivations, balance competing priorities, and coordinate across multiple agents moves closer to human-like general reasoning.
AGI Date (-1 days): The $480 million seed funding and talent concentration from top AI labs accelerates development of underexplored model architectures focused on social intelligence and multi-agent systems, which are critical components of AGI. The company's approach of co-developing novel training methods with product interfaces could yield faster insights into coordination capabilities that other labs haven't prioritized.