Jurassic (AI21)
By AI21 Labs
Jurassic is a family of large language models developed by AI21 Labs, an Israeli AI company, with Jurassic-1 released in 2021 and Jurassic-2 following in 2023, offered via AI21's own API and cloud marketplaces before the company shifted…
Definition
Jurassic is a family of large language models developed by AI21 Labs, an Israeli AI company, with Jurassic-1 released in 2021 and Jurassic-2 following in 2023, offered via AI21's own API and cloud marketplaces before the company shifted its flagship focus to the newer Jamba architecture.
Overview
AI21 Labs was among the earlier companies to offer large language models as a commercial API, alongside OpenAI's GPT-3. Jurassic-1, released in 2021, came in multiple sizes and was notable at the time for its large vocabulary, aimed at more efficient tokenization across a broad range of text. Jurassic-2, released in 2023, followed with improved general-purpose performance and multiple size tiers — commonly referred to as Light, Mid, and Ultra — aimed at different cost and capability trade-offs, and added instruction-following variants better suited to chat-style interaction. Jurassic models were made available both through AI21's own API and through major cloud marketplaces, including Amazon Titan's host, Amazon Bedrock, giving enterprise customers a way to access them alongside other providers' models within the same procurement and security framework. AI21 has since shifted its flagship model development toward Jamba (AI21), a hybrid architecture combining Transformer Attention Mechanism layers with State Space Model (Mamba) layers, aimed at improved efficiency on long-context tasks. Jurassic remains notable as part of the early wave of commercial LLM offerings that helped establish the market for API-accessed foundation models before the current generation of frontier labs came to dominate public attention.
Key Features
- Developed by AI21 Labs, an early entrant in the commercial LLM API market
- Jurassic-1 (2021) was notable for its large vocabulary and efficient tokenization
- Jurassic-2 (2023) added multiple size tiers and instruction-following variants
- Offered through AI21's own API and major cloud marketplaces including AWS
- Predecessor to AI21's current flagship Jamba hybrid architecture
- Represents part of the early wave of commercially available foundation models