Recognai and Rubrix renamed to Argilla

A year ago, the Recognai team launched our first product: Rubrix. Built as the internal data labelling and management platform powering our NLP consultancy, Rubrix is the battle-hardened product of countless customer deployments, iterations, and learnings from our most important constituency: users.

After four years of building enterprise NLP applications and contributing to the open-source community, we realized that Rubrix could be a useful tool for all NLP practitioners. It fills a gap in the existing stack: a data-centric platform for the most sophisticated labelling practices that is, simultaneously, simple to integrate with other NLP and MLOps tools.

One year later, we're thrilled to see Rubrix used by hundreds of users and companies around the world. We're lucky to have a wonderful community of practitioners giving feedback and contributing to the product. In order to better serve the community, our team has committed to putting our full-time focus, passion, and resources behind the product. Lately, we’ve often been asked to explain what Recognai is to Rubrix, and what Rubrix is to Recognai. This question led us to rethink:

Recognai is our company, founded in 2017, through which we’ve focused on a mix of consulting services and product development. Now that our primary efforts are devoted to developing the core Rubrix platform, we asked ourselves: is the Recognai brand still useful?

Simultaneously, we considered Rubrix, the name of our first product. It comes from the word rubric, in the educational sense: an assessment tool for evaluating learners of a specific subject. It’s a good concept for a data-centric NLP product, but we asked ourselves: does Rubrix reflect our core values?

The answer is probably no.

The fundamental value for our organization, and our products, is the human-centric approach. That's why, after many iterations, we're happy to introduce Argilla.

Enter Argilla

Argilla comes from clay in Latin. Modelling clay is one of the oldest materials used by humans to make tools, art objects, and even musical instruments such as the ocarina! In this era of powerful foundation AI models, building new tools is a matter of human collaboration and creativity.

The best way to make robust tools with AI is through quality, accountable data. We’re moving away from “data is the new oil” into “data is the new clay”. We shape models by providing high-quality inputs to our models (be it prompts, training examples, or user feedback). When we think about Argilla, we envision a powerful image of someone giving form to a new tool with her hands and creativity.

The new name comes with a new image. Our in-house design team, together with Julien Roudaut (new branding) and Christophe Peter at Wanaka (new website UI) worked to create the new visual identity.

We swap angles for curves, upper case for lower case, and electric tones for warmer tones. Through these new shapes and colors we want to reinforce our position as an open, accessible, flexible, and universal product.

What does it change for our users?

Not much! We’re really excited about this new phase and we’ll be doubling-down on open-source and our wonderful community. We are now a product company called Argilla.

Argilla comes with a new and more accessible UI design but the most important change for our current users is the new name for the Python package:

• rubrix 0.18.0 will be the last version of the library under its previous name
• The new argilla package starts at 1.0.0
• Migration from Rubrix into Argilla should be smooth and as easy as replacing the import rubrix with import argilla. You can check the migration guide or contact us directly, we’d be super happy to help.