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The recent Krutrim fiasco has put the spotlight on the complexities and potential pitfalls of deploying LLMs without adequate oversight and analysis. The repercussions often come in the form of misrepresentation and biases sparking backlash from users and the developer community.
These instances have underscored the need for a sophisticated analytics tool capable of navigating the intricacies of AI-native products. Enter Align AI, a Korea-based analytics tool designed specifically for AI-native products.
Align AI, often likened to “Google Analytics for ChatGPT-like chatbots”, offers a seamless way for companies to collect all user interaction data, including conversation data, with just a few lines of code.
This capability is crucial for identifying and addressing potential issues such as prompt injection attacks or biases in AI responses, thereby safeguarding against business and legal risks.
In an interaction with AIM, Yeop Lee, head of product at Align AI, explained how their product is revolutionising the way companies handle conversational AI analytics.
Lee emphasised the platform’s ability to address and mitigate risks associated with conversational AI. “Leveraging our natural language universal search, as well as our insights feature, we’ve been able to capture all sorts of risks that customers may be facing,” Lee stated, highlighting a case where Align AI helped a customer detect and prevent prompt injection attacks by malicious users.
Align AI’s value proposition extends beyond monitoring, to include analytics aimed at product improvement and revenue generation. “The first [value] is monitoring… making sure that these aren’t happening and the product is running the way it’s supposed to,” Lee explained.
The second value revolves around analytics, focusing on enhancing the product to increase user willingness to pay.
The Birth of Align AI
GiJung Kim, CEO and founder of Align AI, shared the unique journey and vision behind the creation of Align AI.
Starting as a B2C generative AI consumer-level product team in 2021, the team’s focus was always on building a superior AI product for users. However, they encountered a significant challenge: the absence of a robust tool to analyse user interactions with their AI.
This gap in the market led to the pivot towards developing Align AI. “There was no good tool for us to analyse how our users are interacting with our own AI,” Kim, recounted.
This realisation came as early as 2020, but the team’s commitment to their B2C product delayed addressing this issue until a fortunate turn of events in March 2023, when they sold their product to Sandal, a listed company in Korea. This sale provided the necessary resources and freedom to focus on solving the problem of analysing user interactions for AI-native products.
Kim also highlighted the origin of the team, which started as a research team in a university lab, later disrupted by COVID-19. This disruption led them to live together and embark on an AI project, laying the foundation for what would become Align AI.
“We weren’t expecting to build Align AI from the beginning… we were just riding the generative AI wave,” Kim stated.
Tech Stack
The founder provided an in-depth explanation of how their product processes and utilises conversational data from clients.
Once the data is ingested, Align AI focuses on making it readable through indexing and programmatic labelling, which allows for efficient searching and extraction of important data. “We need to index the data well, and we need to extract the important data well, and then we need to index that as well,” Kim stated.
This process enables Align AI to match conversation data with search queries effectively. Kim described a re-ranking method used to organise search results according to their relevance to the user’s query, ensuring that clients can easily access the information they need.
Align AI’s backend primarily uses Go (Golang), with the frontend in React. For AI components, they utilise both OpenAI API and their proprietary AI models, depending on the task.
“For most of the generating part, we have to stick with OpenAI because performance-wise, it’s the best in the market,” Kim mentioned, highlighting the blend of open-source models and OpenAI’s API to achieve optimal performance and cost-effectiveness.
He explained, “For retrieving the data or just getting the keywords out, like extracting the keyword, those parts, actually open source models are good enough and a lot cheaper.”
Align AI also focuses on building its own embedding models to reduce dependency on OpenAI.
Clientele and Focus on Indian Market
In terms of clientele, Align AI has expanded beyond Korea, onboarding customers from the US, EU, and India, with a focus on English-speaking users in the early stages. The Indian market, in particular, is seen as a key area for expansion due to its strong engineering focus and proficiency in English.
Kim expressed high expectations for the Indian market, considering it a significant focus area for their expansion. “India is going to be a very important market for us,” Kim stated, noting the proficiency in English among Indian users as a key advantage for early-stage understanding of customer needs.
During a visit to the Machine Learning Developers Summit (MLDS) organised by AIM, Kim observed a vibrant community of Indian engineers and entrepreneurs actively engaging with frontier technologies, including AI chatbots.
This encounter led to unexpected connections with Indian entrepreneurs, who began signing up for Align AI’s product without any targeted marketing efforts from the company. “We began forging connections with Indian entrepreneurs. They were able to find our product and they started signing up,” Kim recounted, highlighting the organically piqued interest in Align AI within the Indian tech community
Align AI founded in 2021 by Gijung Kim, Joowon Kim, and Juyoung Jeong has undergone two rounds of funding, including a recent $3.5 million seed round, and is looking to address the challenges of multimodality in AI, anticipating a future where virtual humans interact with users in real-time in a highly personalised manner.
What’s Next?
Kim also shared insights into the company’s future vision, emphasising the shift towards hyper-personalised AI experiences. He believes that AI integration into products is inevitable, likening the initial versions of AI that users interact with to children who need to learn and grow.
This perspective underscores the value of Align AI’s product in enhancing AI interactions. “Hyper-personalised experience is the future. We have to shift the focus not only to the company, but more towards individuals,” Kim stated, highlighting the need for multimodality and the evolving landscape of AI interactions.
Kim also discussed the importance of multimodal data analysis, predicting the emergence of virtual humans interacting with users in real-time in a highly personalised manner within the next few years. This vision emphasises Align AI’s role in advancing conversational AI analytics and supporting the growth of AI-native products.
Align AI is poised to make a significant impact in the Indian market and beyond, with a strong product offering and a vision that aligns with the needs of a tech-savvy and English-proficient user base.
