Flapping Airplanes And The Promise Of Research-Driven AI

Flapping Airplanes And The Promise Of Research-Driven AI

Flapping Airplanes Raises $180M for Data-Efficient AI Flapping Airplanes has launched as a foundational AI research lab with $180 million in seed funding to solve one of artificial intelligence's most pressing challenges: data inefficiency. Backed by Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures, the lab rejects the industry's scaling obsession in favor of long-term research breakthroughs that could enable models to learn with dramatically less training data. This approach positions the startup at the forefront of a growing movement questioning whether brute-force compute expansion is the only path to advanced AI. Credit: Flapping Airplanes The founding team includes Benjamin S., Asher Spector, and Aidan Smith—researchers who believe current large language models waste enormous resources learning patterns humans grasp from minimal exposure. Their vision imagines AI systems that think at human cognitive levels without requiring internet-scale datasets or billion-dollar comp…