Google working with Vijil to deliver
trustworthy AI agents to enterprises
MENLO
PARK, Calif., July 24,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Vijil emerged from stealth
today with $6 million in funding from
Mayfield's AIStart seed fund and Gradient Ventures, Google's
AI-focused seed fund. Along with funding, Vijil announced cloud
services for building generative AI agents with reliability,
security, and safety by design. Using Vijil cloud services to
evaluate and defend trustworthy agents, AI engineers at enterprises
can shorten time-to-value while maintaining governance, risk
management, and compliance at all times.
Today, many organizations are drawn to the transformative
potential of generative AI but are held back from deploying
prototypes into production because the technology poses unknown
risks to reputation and revenue. In some well-known cases, AI
agents have recommended a competitor's product, confabulated
airline ticket refund policies, and concocted legal cases.
Enterprises today cannot trust AI chatbots, virtual assistants, and
co-pilots for business-critical use because the generative AI
models inside are inherently unreliable under atypical conditions,
vulnerable to attack, and prone to risk. In noisy or hostile
environments, generative AI models can make egregious errors,
assert falsehoods, divulge confidential or personal information,
produce toxic responses, generate malware, or drive biased, unfair,
unethical, or dangerous actions.
Enterprises cannot build trustworthy agents effectively because
they cannot measure trust efficiently. To measure trust, AI teams
either rely on external red-team consultants, resort to benchmarks,
or surrender to "vibe checks". But AI red-team consultants cannot
scale to pervasive use of generative AI agents. And benchmarks are
broken in several ways. Most academic benchmarks are irrelevant to
enterprise use cases. Publicly available benchmark data is pulled
into the training data contaminating test results. Open-source
benchmarking tools are neither fast nor free – they take many days
and thousands of dollars to run one benchmark. Commercial
evaluation services test for task performance but fail to test
reliability, security, and safety. The threats are unrelenting – AI
developers must scour the media continuously for "jailbreaks" and
malicious prompts. All this takes time and effort that distracts
from core development. As a result, AI teams are delayed or
altogether blocked from deploying AI agents that they can trust in
production.
Vijil helps enterprises build and operate AI agents that people
can trust. Vijil measures the trustworthiness of an AI agent by
automatically evaluating its behavior with tests that are tailored
to its business context. Using only a few samples of usage data
from each customer, Vijil synthesizes a comprehensive test suite to
measure the performance, reliability, privacy, security, and safety
of the AI agent in that context. To mitigate the risks detected by
the comprehensive evaluation, Vijil uses the defense-in-depth
strategy to provide several layers of safeguards. The first of
these is a perimeter defense mechanism that detects malicious
prompts and unsafe responses with high accuracy and high speed,
adaptively learning from its usage to continuously improve the AI
system's compliance with organizational policy.
"Google is pleased to collaborate with Vijil on tools to help
enterprises customize Gemma and other open models for trust as well
as task," said Manvinder Singh,
Director of Product Management, Google. "By adapting the Google
Responsible Generative AI Toolkit to the needs of enterprises in
various industries, Vijil provides critical capabilities for AI
developers to preserve the privacy, security, and safety of custom
models downstream with the same rigor that went into their original
release."
Using Vijil, enterprises can audit and improve trust in various
generative AI systems including open large language models, closed
AI APIs, Retrieval Augmented Generative (RAG) applications, and AI
agents. The Vijil Evaluate cloud service provides full, fast, and
easy evaluations of AI systems, offering a scalable API to execute
over 1.5 million tests up to 100X faster than the next best
alternative. The Vijil Dome product offers adaptive defense in
real-time with the same comprehensive coverage of errors and
attacks, while learning from its usage to continuously improve the
accuracy and speed of detection.
"The promise of generative AI comes with the responsibility to
use its potential wisely," said Darian
Shirazi, General Partner, Gradient Ventures. "Gradient is
pleased to invest in Vijil to help accelerate the enterprise
adoption of responsible AI with reliability, security, and safety
by design."
"Mayfield has a long history of championing entrepreneurs on
their journeys from inception to iconic," said Vijay Reddy, Mayfield
Partner for AIStart Fund. "In Vijil, we saw an accomplished
founding team with over a decade of experience building large-scale
AI systems, a customer-obsessed approach to developing technology,
and the conviction to pursue a compelling opportunity with
tenacity. We envision a world where cognitive assistants work
alongside humans to automate mundane tasks and complex assignments.
Vijil is positioned to deliver the layer of trust in every platform
built for AI agents."
"We cannot trust autonomous agents today, no matter how
intelligent they may seem, the way we trust the people we employ,"
said Vin Sharma, co-founder and CEO
of Vijil. "As humans, we have had 4 million years of genetic
evolution and 400 thousand years of cultural evolution to
understand interpersonal trust. And we have metrics and mechanisms
to measure and maintain that trust. But agents must earn our trust
starting with a deficit. We started Vijil to accelerate the
evolution of trustworthy agents by building a trusted operating
system for their development and deployment. Vijil helps you build
and operate agents that you can trust based on open, safe, and
secure models."
The Vijil cloud services are available today for private
preview. Enterprises can subscribe to Vijil via Google Cloud
Marketplace and deploy Vijil software within their private network
on Google Cloud or on-premises. Enterprises can rest assured that
all application inputs, outputs, or metrics stay inside their
corporate network. Vijil subscribers get continuous detection and
mitigation of risks along with customized technical support. Join
the waitlist at vijil.ai.
About Vijil
Founded by engineering leaders from AWS
who built the LLM engines of Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock,
Vijil is helping enterprises build and operate AI agents that
people can trust. Backed by Mayfield AIStart and Gradient Ventures,
Vijil is committed to open innovation via research collaboration
with academic partners, open-source contributions to relevant
projects, and alliances with industry partners who support open
foundation models. Other investors and advisors include Dr.
Bratin Saha, previously VP and GM
for AWS AI, Joe Spisak, Director of
Product for Generative AI at Meta, Dr. Leon Derczynski, Principal
Research Scientist at NVIDIA and leading member of OWASP Top 10 for
LLM.
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SOURCE Vijil Inc