Humans& thinks coordination is the next frontier for AI, and they're building a model to prove it | TechCrunch

"Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, thinks closing that gap is the next major frontier for foundation models. The company this week raised a $480 million seed round to build a "central nervous system" for the human-plus-AI economy. The startup's " AI for empowering humans " framing has dominated early coverage, but the company's actual ambition is more novel: building a new foundation model architecture designed for social intelligence, not just information retrieval or code generation."

""It feels like we're ending the first paradigm of scaling, where question-answering models were trained to be very smart at particular verticals, and now we're entering what we believe to be the second wave of adoption where the average consumer or user is trying to figure out what to do with all these things," Andi Peng, one of humans&'s co-founders and a former Anthropic employee, told TechCrunch."

"Humans&'s pitch centers on helping usher people into the new era of AI, moving beyond the narrative that AI will take their jobs. Whether or not that's just marketing speak, the timing is critical: Companies are transitioning from chat to agents. Models are competent, but workflows aren't, and the coordination challenge remains largely unaddressed. And through it all, people feel threatened and overwhelmed by AI."

AI chatbots excel at question answering, summarization, and equation solving but remain single-user assistants lacking coordination capabilities for real collaboration. Humans& is a startup founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind that raised a $480 million seed round to build a "central nervous system" for the human-plus-AI economy. The company focuses on a novel foundation model architecture centered on social intelligence rather than information retrieval or code generation. The goal is to coordinate people with competing priorities, track long-running decisions, align teams over time, and transition workflows from chat to agents.

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