Highlights:
- Forty startups and industry-leading projects will receive specialized coaching from top AI experts over six weeks.
- Audiences are welcome to the Vercel Accelerator website to learn more about the application process.
Vercel Inc., a front-end application development platform startup, recently launched a new family of AI products and an accelerator program for AI builders to scale up their projects.
The new Vercel AI Accelerator is designed to help early-stage startups by giving them the necessary resources to build and scale their AI solutions. They will take the form of funding, credits for application programming interfaces at leading AI companies, and coaching and access to a large developer community.
San Francisco-based Vercel offers its developer community a popular cloud-based platform that enables quick website creation, deployment, and hosting. Additionally, its solution makes it simple for developers to carry out related development tasks, like troubleshooting performance problems. With the platform, developers can delegate back-end work to APIs and infrastructure without worrying about building both the front-end and the back-end.
Vice President of developer experience at Vercel, Lee Robinson, said, “In a rapidly evolving technological landscape, where AI has emerged as the dominant force, developers must have the ability to seamlessly deploy AI applications and tools whenever inspiration strikes.”
Through the new accelerator program, 40 market-leading projects and startups will access specialized coaching with top AI experts who will impart their knowledge and offer direction over six weeks. This will happen during office hours and fireside chats. Vercel also has a dedicated Developer Experience Team to mentor new businesses and independent builders.
Many top AI companies have also joined, contributing over USD 850,000 in API credits that will be distributed among the accelerator program participants. Names of tech giants like Eleven Labs Inc., Cohere Inc., Anthropic, Stability AI Ltd., OpenAI LP, are part of the program. Additionally, Vercel’s Front-end Cloud platform credits will be given to builders.
The accelerator program offered by Vercel includes both dedicated time with an investor who provides guidance and feedback in the form of a fireside chat and office hours. Access to investors is crucial for builders and startups in the competitive AI landscape. Applicants can visit the Vercel Accelerator website to apply for a chance to start the program promptly.
In addition to the accelerator program, Vercel is also introducing a new line of products that will enable programmers to create and deploy AI applications. These consist of a chatbot, a software development kit, and an interactive testing and experimentation playground.
Robinson said, “Front-end developers face the challenge of building and shipping products within tight timelines, often without enough resources to invest in costly AI development. Rapid product delivery is crucial, and that’s where an agile development environment becomes essential. Developers need a platform that enables them to move quickly, delivering products to end users when it matters most.”
In the first four months of 2023, according to Robinson, the Frontend Cloud saw an 800% increase in the number of AI businesses using it. He said, “We recognized the need to provide developers with the necessary resources to deploy dynamic AI experiences.”
Developers can test and experiment with AI technologies collaboratively using the recently released Vercel AI Playground without setting up challenging local environments or deploying AI models on their infrastructure. That suggests that experimentation can start immediately for developers with access to the playground.
Additionally, it was created with collaboration in mind, enabling developers to share design insights and learn from one another’s experiments. Thus, developers can more effectively speed up their learning processes together.
The Vercel AI SDK is a JavaScript library available as open-source. Its purpose is to assist developers in swiftly constructing front-end conversational streaming text and chat user interfaces. This SDK allows developers to easily incorporate chatbots and prompt engines into their web applications, enabling scalability.
The company also provides a chatbot starter template to help develop and deploy AI chatbot solutions easily. Although many large businesses have already integrated chatbots into their applications, creating these AI models in-house is a challenging and time-consuming task.
Businesses can create their own chatbots with Vercel’s solution, maintaining control over their data and guaranteeing a consistent user experience with front-end development tools and infrastructure for deploying chatbot solutions at a large scale.