Baseten, a company that hosts AI models for other businesses to run, has launched Hosted Tools, which lets a model call something like a web search from inside Baseten's own inference stack instead of handing the request back to the application and waiting for an answer to come back. Baseten says its own benchmarks show a 15 percent cut in total response time against the older method, a company figure with no independent test behind it yet. The first tool is web search, and rather than build one, Baseten has plugged in four existing search providers: Exa, Keenable, Parallel and You.com. This is the kind of plumbing that makes an AI assistant feel quicker when it has to go and look something up, without you ever seeing the change.
Baseten, a company that runs AI models on servers for other businesses, said it can now update a large model like GLM-5.3 across independent computer clusters around the world in under 40 seconds, with only 6 seconds where incoming requests have to wait. It does this by sending only the parts of the model that actually changed, compressing what would otherwise be 716.56 gigabytes of updated data down to 1.55 gigabytes. These are Baseten's own reported figures for its own system, not independently benchmarked, but they describe a real engineering change rather than a new product. For anyone using an AI powered app or chatbot, this is part of why those services can update to a smarter model without going offline while it happens.
Baseten runs AI models for other companies. It raised 1.5 billion dollars in two parts, priced at 11 and 13 billion, five months after a round that valued it at 5 billion. No revenue figure was disclosed with either round.