Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, thinks closing that gap is the next major frontier for foundation models. The company this week raised a $480 million seed round to build a "central nervous system" for the human-plus-AI economy. The startup's " AI for empowering humans " framing has dominated early coverage, but the company's actual ambition is more novel: building a new foundation model architecture designed for social intelligence, not just information retrieval or code generation.