Developing Empathetic LLMs
Although the amount of funding pales in comparison to other areas of AI, over $1.5 billion has been invested in companies like Hume (proprietary LLM), Inflection AI (Pi.ai proprietary LLM), and BambuAI (commercial LLM) in order to develop empathetic AIs.

My partners and I have also put considerable effort into this area and achieved rather remarkable results through the selection of the right underlying commercial model (e.g., Llama, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, etc), prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, and deep research into empathy.

This work has been critical to better understanding and evaluating LLMs for empathy. Our own LLM, Emy (not commercialized, but part of a study at the University of Houston), will be included in next week’s benchmarks.