Factory Raises $50M Series B
factory.ai
factory.ai
I couldn't resist.
I wrote my thoughts[0] and felt whilst it is good to be model agnostic, the core has to be open because it is too important a tool to be left entirely in hand of others. It is also super simple to understand, OpenAI only has <5 tools for a coding agent to be functional.
Reeks of self-driving startups getting funded out of every garage, about a decade ago.
Expecting to see consolidation / acquihiring / and straight-up running-outta-money in 3..2..1 years
If that were the case a simple example is much of software services we see today (and provide real tangible value) wouldn't exist as it's theoretically just updating data in a database.
>Every AI coding platform forces you to choose: one IDE, one LLM, one agent, one interface. Subscribing and unsubscribing from plans to try and stay at the cutting edge is now obsolete. Developers deserve a choice. Factory is giving choice back to developers. Droids work with any LLM, in any IDE, in local or remote, and in any interface. You can delegate tasks to Droids from your Terminal, your IDE, Slack, Linear, or on the web. For further customization, you can use headless mode to set up scripts or triggers to run Droids tailored to your team's workflow.
The Factory.ai Droid does rank well in the terminal-bench leaderboard (currently 3 of the top 5)
They will go to wherever they can get the best model, driving whoever is crazy enough to offer for them for 20/mo almost immediately out of business.
There's no flat pricing model that can sustain what developers try to throw at it.
You're welcome to speak for yourself and your use cases, but speaking for all humankind seems a bit much.
https://ethanding.substack.com/p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-...
For weeks, they've had a line of dozens even at 9pm when I drive by.
I don't think that "everyone likes trying new things when they first become available" is unique to AI. Even ice cream stores have this effect, so I'm not sure if you just discount everything new or aren't familiar with this general phenomenon.
Almost like demand and markets can change/grow in response to what is offered
Human nature is to buzz around anything new more than stuff we already know, and of course that dynamic will surround new and exciting things
Like cutting edge AI
I’d probably try the factory ‘droid’ first, but if it fails to solve a problem and swapping to another one means it solves it, I’ll probably never use the factory one again.
I’d consider this pretty normal as we’re moving closer to ‘this is actually a mature stack that devs use for work’. Very few people in my company actually take interest in their development tooling and use whatever came pre-configured. (our stack is not sexy)
(Let me know if I’m incorrectly conflating the ‘droid’ concept with foundation models)
If there’s a firehose of money, maybe I’m the stupid one for not standing in front of it.
After all, a bubble is just a bull market you don’t have a position in :)
That's a good one. I think I might steal it :)
The TAM, if you got absolutely every one of these people onto a $20/mo plan is $500,000,000/mo. For reference, that’s less than Airbnb’s revenue.
It's the actual engineers, lawyers, marketers, medical professionals and accountants that are the real targets.
There is a lot of focus on AI assisting software development right now because they are the people most willing to use it. AI as it is now will probably create more SWE positions overall. What you will have is software designers being added by AI and it's domain knowledge to build applications that replace the other professional roles.
The cost to utilize AI is going to be much much more expensive as it is heavily subsidized right now.
I discovered this by accident, simply by asking the model number. And all the answers didn't match the actual model listed in the settings.
It’s a system for interacting with LLMs in multiple ways to do all the neat agenty things you might want to do with them. Find it convenient to work in a web browser with code actions running in a cloud VM? Sure. Prefer to work with a TUI client in your terminal (or from within Emacs, as I was using it today)? You bet. As a headless command line tool that you can use to script up cron jobs or wire into a Slack bot or run in a GitHub action? You can do that. And in each of those situations, you can choose the model you want to use, without separately creating an account with each provider.
That’s the gist of it from my perspective as an engineer. There’s more to it than that, but these are the bits that I personally love.
This answer has way less meaning to the readers than you think
Nothing against producing code that's AI but code reviewable easily by humans, This is ideal in fact. But having a ton of AI slop that's unreadable by humans is not maintainable. There's of course applications like internal tools, or short lived software where this is useful no doubt.