From TechCrunch, November 6:
Valued at $1B, Kai-Fu Lee's LLM startup unveils open source model
Kai-Fu Lee, the computer scientist known in the West for his bestseller "AI Superpowers" and in China for his bets on artificial intelligence unicorns, has a new venture -- and a great ambition.
In late March, Lee launched a company called 01.AI with the vision to develop a homegrown large language model for the Chinese market. The venture puts him in competition with other prominent Chinese tech leaders, including Sogou's founder Wang Xiaochuan, who have been swiftly gathering talent and venture capital to establish China's equivalents of OpenAI.
"I think necessity is the mother of innovation, and there's clearly a huge necessity in China," Lee, who's 61 and leading 01.AI as CEO, told TechCrunch in an interview, explaining the motive behind starting the company. "Unlike the rest of the world, China doesn't have access to OpenAI and Google because those two companies did not make their products available in China, so I think many doing LLM are trying to do their part in creating a solution for a market that really needs this."
01.AI's growth is a fitting reflection of the rapid development in the generative AI field. Seven months after its founding, the startup has released its first model, the open source Yi-34B. The decision to introduce an open LLM as its debut product is a way to "give back" to society, said Lee. For people who have felt LLaMA is a "godsend" to them, "we've provided a compelling alternative," he added.
As of writing, Yi-34B, which is a bilingual (English and Chinese) base model trained with 34 billion parameters and significantly smaller than other open models like Falcon-180B and Meta LlaMa2-70B, came in first amongst pre-trained LLM models, according to a ranking by Hugging Face.
"We still believe that larger models, when trained well, on a large amount of high-quality data, will always outperform substantially smaller models of comparable quality and comparable technology, so I think [Yi-34B] outperforming much larger models is something that we don't usually see," said Lee. "We feel quite confident as we released models that are 100 billion to 400 billion over the next coming year, year and a half, these models will be dramatically better than today's model that we announced."
The startup's ability to commence model training quickly is no doubt an outcome of its smooth fundraising, which is critical to securing top-tier talent and AI processors. While declining to disclose how much 01.AI has raised, Lee said it's valued at $1 billion after receiving financing from Sinovation Ventures, Alibaba Cloud and other undisclosed investors.
01.AI has already grown to more than 100 employees, over half of whom are LLM experts from major multinational and Chinese tech firms. Its vice president of technology, for instance, is an early member of Google's Bard, and its chief architect was a founding member of TensorFlow and worked alongside renowned researchers like Jeff Dean and Samy Bengio at Google Brain. The key figures behind Yi-34B are Wenhao Huang, a Microsoft Research Asia veteran, and Ethan Dai, who held senior AI positions at Huawei and Alibaba.
Having backed over 10 unicorns and venture-built seven companies through Sinovation Ventures, Lee is possibly one of the most well-connected investors and entrepreneurs in China....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
"Kai-Fu Lee launches AI start-up to seize on ‘historical opportunity’ to build Chinese LLMs"
March 2023:Artificial Intelligence Guru Kai-Fu Lee: "China Can Quickly Catch Up to US AI..."
Dr. Lee knows some stuff, links after the jump....
September 2018: "If You Read Only One Column On Artificial Intelligence This Month..."
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in May we thumbnailed Lee Kai-fu as "Sometimes the competition is just
plain intimidating/scary/resistance-is-futile, smart."
Followed by his mini-bio from Edge.org:
"KAI-FU LEE, the founder of the Beijing-based Sinovation Ventures, is ranked #1 in technology in China by Forbes. Educated as a computer scientist at Columbia and Carnegie Mellon, his distinguished career includes working as a research scientist at Apple; Vice President of the Web Products Division at Silicon Graphics; Corporate Vice President at Microsoft and founder of Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, one of the world’s top research labs; and then Google Corporate President and President of Google Greater China. As an Internet celebrity, he has fifty million+ followers on the Chinese micro-blogging website Weibo. As an author, among his seven bestsellers in the Chinese language, two have sold more than one million copies each. His first book in English is AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (forthcoming, September)
The computer brainiacs at IEEE Spectrum are fans, linked in "AI: 'Kai-Fu Lee'".
See also:
- AI VC: "We Are Here To Create"
- Kai-Fu Lee on Artificial Intelligence: "Why Computers Don’t Need to Match Human Intelligence"
- AI: "Kai-Fu Lee"
And many more. Use the 'search blog' box, upper left.
