Hours, Not Months – The Custom AI Era is Now

When we started Oumi, we set out to build a better future for AI – grounded in the benefits of open source. Eight months ago, we open-sourced the most comprehensive repo for training foundation models end-to-end.

Today, we’re building on that by enabling every developer and enterprise to train custom models in hours, not months – a foundational shift in how teams build, ship, and own AI.

Soon, leading enterprises will be running custom models in production. The reason is simple: fine-tuning just became as easy as prompt-optimization – and the benefits are massive.

Why custom AI

As competition heats up, and as inference and agentic use cases scale, custom AI moves from nice-to-have to must-have:

• Improve accuracy for your use case: A specialized model can unlock the last ~20% you need to clear production bars. It can unlock an edge from your data.

• Lower costs: Save up to 90% of your inference spend with smaller models – critical as tokens explode with production usage.

• Reduce latency: Speed matters for agentic use cases. Smaller models are faster – no users like waiting for their agents.

• Keep control: Closed APIs change silently, forced migrations to newer models, price increases. Custom open models give you privacy, stability, and leverage.

The barrier has been time

Most teams haven’t built custom models because fine-tuning used to take months. Not because training itself is hard, but because data and evaluation iterations were slow: curate test set → evaluate → find failure modes → generate training data to improve → train… and repeat until you hit your targets.

Talk to ML leaders at Fortune 500s and you’ll hear: “We want to fine-tune, we just haven’t had the time.” Talk to startups and you’ll hear: “Anthropic is our R&D and we just curate our prompts. We’ll worry about differentiation at the model layer later.” That’s changing.

Custom AI in hours, not months, is the unlock

Models are now strong enough to generate high-signal training data and evaluate behavior. Now, you can use AI to:

1. Evaluate models and diagnose weak spots

2. Generate targeted data to improve performance

3. Train the model

   … then cycle – all in hours, not months

That AI-powered loop is Oumi. It’s as straightforward as prompt engineering, but the benefits are way bigger.

And when a new model drops, you haven’t lost months of work. Slot it into the loop, auto-adjust the dataset, and - if the new version wins - ship it the same day. Hours, not months.

Custom models in action

A leading healthcare provider needed to extract information from dozens of different medical records. State of the art closed models like OpenAI’s GPT models and Claude weren’t good enough. With Oumi, they fine-tuned task-specific models and improved performance by over 20% – passing the production bar. They shipped multiple small models to target the different systems and cut inference costs by 70%. They’ve decided not to go back to closed models, because custom is better, cheaper, and easy to build.

The Landscape & Oumi

The world is now waking up to model customization. From hyperscalers to neo-clouds to well-funded newcomers, training is everywhere because generic models aren’t enough. But most start—and stop—at training. Oumi is the only player that solves the entire eval → data synthesis → train loops, so any team can improve accuracy, lower costs, reduce latency, and gain control in hours, not months.

And we have the team to do it. We’ve pioneered core techniques; spearheaded and managed Google’s PaLM → Gemini effort; built state of the art SLMs at Apple; shipped production AI at Microsoft; and stood up the GTM engine at Cohere. The Oumi team has extreme technical depth and a razor sharp focus – a potent mix.

An invitation - Design Partner Program

We’re opening access to Oumi’s hosted platform later this year. In advance, to prove the impact, we’re creating custom models for a small number of design partners - at no cost.

We’ll do the work and hand you a production-ready model. If you want in, reach out to contact@oumi.ai. And as always, you can DIY with our open source stack.

We can’t wait to see the custom models that you will build!

— Manos, CEO @ Oumi