A startup that is working to develop products that will place safety guardrails on popular artificial intelligence platforms has established Pittsburgh as its official headquarters as it actively looks to recruit local talent to its growing team.
Preamble AI Inc., which previously based operations out of Los Angeles, is now using the coworking space managed by Industrious at Liberty Center downtown as its home.
And while much of the 12-person team works remotely, Preamble CEO and Co-Founder Jeremy McHugh is hoping to onboard Pittsburgh-based engineers and other employees in the coming months. He founded the company in 2020 alongside Chief Product Officer Jonathan Cefalu, Chief Research Officer Dylan Hadfield-Menell and Chief Technology Officer Leyla Hujer.
"As we are looking to establish a physical presence after the post-Covid era, we see this as a great location for the tech industry as people have kind of moved around," McHugh said. "As they've left the big Silicon Valley [region] and kind of migrated east, a lot more people have come to the Pittsburgh area because of the cost of living and the universities that are here."
With Preamble, McHugh envisions a marketplace of products made in partnership with interested parties that could help instill their own desired safety policies as it relates to possible outputs that a generative AI platform, like Open AI Inc.'s ChatGPT, can produce for an end user. Ideally, Preamble will be input agnostic, though working directly with Open AI and other similar tech companies would also benefit the startup's goals of trying to make the widespread use of AI safer.
"Preamble is basically creating the safety platform to control the output of [something] like ChatGPT based off of various policies that users or organizations can contribute to," McHugh said. "They share their values and their policies for their industry. We help connect and grow that kind of marketplace for other companies' users to leverage."
McHugh said the company is currently working with a beta product offering and plans to launch its marketplace for others to collaborate on in the next two months. He also said the company is producing revenue, but declined to disclose specific figures at this time.
Preamble is actively raising a Series A funding round after securing "a little over" $4 million in seed funding so far, McHugh said.
