Wix’s prodigy launches a new language model

Base44 is a Vibe Coding company, and allows its users to create digital works using natural language, without the need for code. Now it announces a technological-strategic development: the launch of its own large language model (LLM) – which should free it in the long run from dependence on third parties, and save costs for it and the users.

Maor Shlomo, founder and CEO of Base44, tells Globes that “Base44 has grown to a fairly significant size, we have a lot of traffic, users and data, which allow us to train our models – to give users the best combination of quality, speed, effectiveness and price”.

“Our own model – a strategic advantage”

The company’s announcement states that the model shows competitive performance against the models it replaces, with the possibility of overtaking them as its training continues and the data grows. So far Base44 has been based on existing models, such as Cloud, ChatGPT or Google. “These are models that are good for many things,” Shlomo says. “They can quote Chinese poetry or write code. But precisely because they are so general, there is potential to specialize in the field. Because Base44 deals specifically with applications that non-technical users build for web or mobile, there is room to train a model that will work best for what our users do.”

Recently, the US government decided to block foreign nationals’ access to Anthropic’s AI model, which only reinforces the need to reduce dependency. According to Shlomo, the company started working on their model even earlier, several months ago. “We knew which way the winds were blowing. It is a strategic advantage to control the model, which allows us freedom and efficiency – we are not dependent on another player. This has only become more important since the blockades,” he says. “This is a strategic effort that will continue in the coming years. We want to control all the components of the platform from end to end. There are not many groups in Israel that train models and this is very important, certainly when the American government blocks the use of advanced models.”

In the long run, Shlemo hopes that the model will be good not only for code implementation, but will also help the user make decisions about the product: “If we succeed in cracking this, it will be amazing. We see a lot of applications that build on a base, and try to find the pattern that characterizes success in traffic, and put it into a model that can help with decisions on how to design, and which features are the most suitable.”

Wix, under the management of Avishai Abrahami, is trading at a value of about 1.8 billion dollars after recently reaching a decade low (a 72% drop in the stock in the last year). The company is seen as one of the losers from the development of AI, and the purchase of Base44 was part of its attempt to face the challenge. Recently, Wix announced the layoffs of about 20% of its employees (1,000 people), among other things due to the strengthening of the shekel and the desire to become a leaner and faster company.