AI model training can leave startups managing infrastructure alongside the products they are trying to build.
Willow Care Inc., the company behind AI dictation app Willow Voice, chose CoreWeave Inc. for its forward-deployed support rather than compute alone. The application combines speech recognition with language processing, according to Lawrence Liu (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of Willow.
“The great thing about CoreWeave’s [reinforcement learning] infrastructure is we don’t have to worry about anything under the hood,” Liu said. “The only thing we really need to focus on at this point is eval alignment.”
Liu spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and John Furrier at the Fully Connected event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed CoreWeave’s RL infrastructure, speech recognition paired with a compact post-processing large language model and the goal of making keyboards obsolete. (* Disclosure below.)
AI model training supports a specialized voice interface
Willow fine-tunes its own speech recognition model on quiet, real-world audio, such as a user whispering in a coffee shop. Recognizing that speech is one part of producing usable text, Liu explained.
“I think the main part of our secret sauce is we have this really, really small LLM that post-processes everything that you say,” Liu said. “Now it’s able to format everything correctly, take your inputs and change it to exactly what you would’ve written.”
Most of Willow’s work focuses on training, but inference is growing faster as dictation demand climbs, Liu noted. That shift aligns with CoreWeave’s broader inference push.
“Within two years, we want it such that you don’t even need keyboards anymore,” he said. “You can just speak and your computer understands.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Fully Connected event:
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Fully Connected event. Neither CoreWeave, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)