Meta shook up the race to build more powerful artificial intelligence last July by releasing Llama 2, an AI model similar to the one behind ChatGPT, for anyone to download and use. In November, a little-known startup from Beijing, 01.AI, released its own open source model that outperforms Llama 2 and scores near the top of many leaderboards used to compare the power of AI models.
Within a few days of its release 01.AI’s model, Yi-34B, rocketed to the top spot on a ranking maintained by startup Hugging Face, which compares the abilities of AI language models across various standard benchmarks for automated intelligence. A few months on, modified versions of 01.AI’s model consistently score among the top models available to developers and companies on the Hugging Face list and other leaderboards. On Monday, the startup launched a “multimodal” AI model called Yi-VL-34B that can process images and discuss their contents.
OpenAI, Google, and most other AI companies tightly control their technology, but 01.AI is giving away its AI models in hopes of inspiring a loyal developer base that helps it hatch some killer AI apps. 01.AI, founded in June of last year, has raised $200 million in investment from Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba and others and is valued at over $1 billion, according to Pitchbook.
The startup’s founder and CEO is Kai-Fu Lee, a prominent investor who did pioneering artificial intelligence research before founding Microsoft’s Beijing lab and then leading Google’s Chinese business until 2009, a year before the company largely pulled out of the country. He says the creation of Yi-34B is the culmination of his life’s work trying to build more intelligent machines.
“This has been the vision of my whole career,” Lee says over Zoom from a handsomely decorated apartment in Beijing. “It’s been too long that we’ve had to learn computers’ language—we really need systems that can understand our language, which is speech and text.” In Chinese 01.AI is known as 零一万五, Ling-Yi Wan-Wu in Chinese, which means “zero-one, everything” and alludes to a passage from the Taoist text Tao Te Ching.
01.AI is one of China’s leading contenders in the AI race that was started by OpenAI and ChatGPT and has so far been dominated by US companies. Lee says his company aims to lead the next phase of this revolution by building some of the first “killer apps” built on the capabilities of language models, which earn 01.AI healthy revenues. “The apps that won the mobile era are ones that are mobile-first, like Uber, WeChat, Instagram, TikTok,” Lee says. “The next-gen productivity tools shouldn’t look like Office anymore—Word, Excel, PowerPoint—that’s the wrong way to go.”
01.AI’s engineers are experimenting with different “AI-first” apps, Lee says, for office productivity, creativity, and social media. He says the plan is for them to become successful around the globe, in a similar way to how Chinese-backed social network TikTok and online retailer Temu are top apps with US consumers.
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