Deel unveils Pangaea, specialized language models for HR and payroll

Global payroll and HR software company Deel has introduced Pangaea, a pair of specialized language models for employment and payroll questions, along with a new business called Emet that supplies expert-created training material and evaluates AI performance.

The first Pangaea model, K1, focuses on employment rules and operating procedures, while P1 specializes in payroll. In Deel's own evaluation, K1 scored 70 with a median response time of 7.7 seconds; the four comparison models with higher scores took between 14.8 and 28.4 seconds to complete answers, according to materials Deel provided to VentureBeat.

Deel said K1 was developed by adapting an existing 9-billion-parameter model using its internal reference materials, then fine-tuning it with examples generated by a more capable teacher model. The training set totaled roughly 1.2 billion tokens. P1 builds on Nvidia's Nemotron family, with AI21 Labs performing additional training using payroll examples produced through Emet. Neither model was trained on identifiable employee information or customers' actual payroll records, the company said.

Customers will access Pangaea through Deel AI, the assistant built into Deel's software. For requests that require broader reasoning or complex agent workflows, Deel said it will continue to use general-purpose models. Emet offers three offerings: model evaluations, expert-generated training examples, and practice environments for AI systems.