SAN FRANCISCO, April 9 (Reuters) - - Artificial

intelligence startup Symbolica, which develops foundation models

to compete with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, announced a $31 million

series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures on Tuesday.

General Catalyst, Abstract Ventures and Buckley Ventures

also participated in the round, the company said.

Symbolica has created a framework that will enable it to

develop alternatives to the "transformer" deep learning

architecture, said Symbolica CEO George Morgan, who formerly

worked at Tesla on its self-driving system, referencing

a paper the company co-wrote with Google's AI

subsidiary DeepMind. Transformers are the basis for viral

chatbot ChatGPT and the current generative AI race.

"The transformer is not the end-all-be-all of AI," said

Morgan. "What's happening in the industry now is hacks on hacks

on hacks."

Whether or not AI can continue its rapid ascent in

performance through pumping in more compute power and training

data is hotly debated. Some companies, like Microsoft ( MSFT )

-backed OpenAI, are all-in on finding more compute.

Others, like Symbolica, think different architectures of

foundation models will be able to generate better results than

scaling transformers.

"The industry broadly is contending with the limitations of

transformers, whether it's the costs required to scale them or

their reliability," General Catalyst partner Christopher

Kauffman told Reuters.

Symbolica's first product will be a coding assistant,

although it will not launch until early 2025, Morgan said, as

the company needs to hire and train its model, Morgan said.