Ethan Thornton is trying to do everything all at once

Mach, a startup founded by Ethan Thornton, is pursuing a broad strategy in artificial intelligence, aiming to develop foundational models while also building AI-powered products for consumers and businesses. This contrasts with some competitors who focus on a single area, such as only developing large language models. Thornton, who previously worked at Google DeepMind, stated in an interview that Mach's goal is to "do everything all at once" to accelerate AI development and adoption. The company has reportedly raised $100 million in funding, with participation from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Elad Gil. Mach plans to release its first AI model, codenamed "Project Chimera," in the coming months, which is expected to be a multimodal foundation model capable of understanding and generating text, images, and audio. The company's dual focus on foundational research and product development aims to create a synergistic loop, where insights from product usage inform model improvements and vice versa. Thornton believes this integrated approach is crucial for building truly useful and widely adopted AI systems.