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The venture capitalist and computer scientist wants to create an OpenAI equivalent for China
Kai - Fu Lee , the computer scientist know in the West for his bestseller “ AI Superpowers”and in China for his bets onartificial intelligence unicorns , has a novel venture — and a capital ambition .
In late March , Lee launched a company called01.AIwith the imaginativeness to uprise a homegrown large language model for the Formosan market place . The venture couch him in competition with other spectacular Chinese technical school leaders , includingSogou ’s father Wang Xiaochuan , who have been swiftly gathering talent and venture capital to establish China ’s equivalents of OpenAI .
“ I remember necessity is the female parent of instauration , 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 troupe . “ Unlike the rest of the humanity , China does n’t have approach to OpenAI and Google because those two company did not make their products available in China , so I think many doing LLM are test to do their part in create a solution for a market that really need this . ”
01.AI ’s growth is a meet reflection of the rapid growing in the generative AI landing field . Seven months after its founding , the inauguration has released its first model , the open sourceYi-34B. The decision to introduce an opened LLM as its debut mathematical product is a room to “ give back ” to club , pronounce Lee . For people who have felt LLaMA is a “ godsend ” to them , “ we ’ve provided a compelling choice , ” he bestow .
As of piece of writing , Yi-34B , which is a bilingual ( English and Taiwanese ) theme manikin trained with 34 billion parameters and importantly small than other open model like Falcon-180B and Meta LlaMa2 - 70B , came in first amongst pre - trained LLM manikin , according to a ranking by Hugging Face .
“ We still believe that larger modelling , when trained well , on a large amount of gamey - calibre data , will always outperform substantially small models of comparable quality and comparable technology , so I opine [ Yi-34B ] outperforming much tumid models is something that we do n’t commonly see , ” said Lee . “ We find quite confident as we released models that are 100 billion to 400 billion over the next upcoming year , class and a half , these models will be dramatically dependable than today ’s model that we declare . ”
The startup ’s power to commence role model training promptly is no dubiousness an outcome of its smooth fundraising , which is critical to securing top - level talent and AI processor . While declining to disclose how much 01.AI has upraise , Lee said it ’s valued at $ 1 billion after get funding from Sinovation Ventures , Alibaba Cloud and other undisclosed investor .
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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 phallus of Google ’s Bard , and its main architect was a found appendage of TensorFlow and work alongside famed researchers like Jeff Dean and Samy Bengio at Google Brain . The primal figures behind Yi-34B are Wenhao Huang , a Microsoft Research Asia old-timer , and Ethan Dai , who held senior AI emplacement at Huawei and Alibaba .
Having second over 10 unicorn and speculation - build seven companies through Sinovation Ventures , Lee is possibly one of the most well - relate investor and entrepreneur in China .
“ It ’s been , you know , over 25 yr since the founding of Microsoft Research Asia , and everything I ’ve done has been about getting first-rate swell talent , ” said Lee , who launch Microsoft Research Asia , the U.S. giant ’s biggest research shopping mall abroad , before spearheading Google China . Over the years , Microsoft Research Asia has earned the reputation as the “ West Point ” for nurturing China ’s AI enterpriser .
“ Now , of grade , you require to pay people reasonably , and you take to be private-enterprise in pay , but I really intend that it ’s also about people believing they can make a difference and believing the fellowship can succeed , ” said Lee , appearing in a telecasting call at 9:30 p.m. Beijing time . His stave were just as self - motivating . One of the startup ’s infrastructure experts was act well into the wee hours that mean solar day , still message Lee at 2:15 a.m. to give tongue to his excitement about being part of 01.AI ’s mission .
It ’s no enigma that building LLMs is a costly project . To sustain its cash - intensive operation , 01.AI has plan for monetisation right from the startle . While the company will carry on to open source some of its theoretical account , its object glass is to build a state - of - the - artistic creation proprietary model that serves as a fundament for a various range of commercial products .
“ Wecan’t open source everything , ” enounce Lee . “ We were quite aware of the fact that these big language models require a mess of compute , and therefore , are very expensive . When we set up a lot of money , most of it will be spent on the GPU . give that , we needed to first acquire as much GPU as we could , which we did . ”
Like other LLM players in China , 01.AI has proactively stockpiled GPUs in expectation of U.S. sanctions ; it borrow money to buy processors even before it landed funding . Over the retiring year , the Biden administration has heighten restrictions on China ’s access to high - close AI chips , prompting Chinese firms to pay inflated prices for chips . The foresight was rewarded — 01.AI now has a supply that will do forat least the next 12 - 18 months .
Aside from causing headache for Taiwanese house , U.S. sanction have been a accelerator for innovation by encourage them to optimize the habit of computing might . “ With a very high - quality infrastructure squad , for every 1,000 GPUs , we might be able to press 2,000 GPUs workload out of them , ” said Lee .
01.AI ’s path to monetization hinges largely on its power to get hold intersection - market conniption for its expensive AI manakin . While top - snick LLM scientists are scarce , there ’s no famine of ware endowment in China .
“ China ’s not forrader of the U.S. in LLM , but there ’s no doubt China can build upright lotion than American developers mostly because of the phenomenal mobile internet ecosystem that was built over the last 12 years or so , ” fence Lee .
While the founder give no details on the services in the pipeline , he suggest that the company is experiment with concepts in the productiveness and societal management , and he ’d be “ frustrated ” if 01.AI did n’t release an app within this calendar year .
The startup ’s ultimate end , according to Lee , is to become an ecosystem where extraneous developer can build applications easily . “ The obligation is not just to bear on out good enquiry models , but even more importantly to make software development easy so that there can be compelling software program , ” he suppose . “ At the end of the solar day . It is an ecosystem play . ” Time will say if Lee ’s AI endeavor will pay off .
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