Miguel Cordon · · 2 min readFormer Google China president unveils OpenAI competitor
01.AI’s Kai-Fu Lee / Photo credit: Shutterstock
Renowned venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee has reaffirmed that China cannot afford to miss the “historic opportunity” to develop its own AI large language models (LLMs).
Yesterday, his VC firm Sinovation Ventures unveiled 01.AI, a company aiming to facilitate the development and implementation of “artificial intelligence 2.0” at various levels, from platforms to applications. The firm has a focus on large-scale model foundations.
“AI 2.0 will present a platform opportunity ten times larger than the mobile internet,” the VC firm said in a WeChat post. “It will rewrite existing software, user interfaces, and applications while giving rise to a new wave of AI-first applications and AI-led business models.”
The establishment of 01.AI comes after Lee announced his Project AI 2.0 in March, in which he sought global talent in areas such as LLM, multimodality, AI algorithms, and infrastructure.
Headquartered in Beijing, 01.AI’s founding team includes former top officials from Alibaba, Baidu, Didi, Google China, Microsoft, SAP, among others. 01.AI plans to release an open-source version of its model to “collectively improve the model and promote the global developer ecosystem of AI 2.0.”
In 2009, Lee founded Sinovation Ventures to focus on helping build Chinese high-tech companies. It has raised US$3.5 billion in funding, according to Crunchbase data.
Lee also authored AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order.
Last week, Baidu released its latest version of Ernie. The company said Ernie 3.5 can stand toe to toe with OpenAI’s latest iteration of its GPT tech.
See also: Generative AI is already disrupting marketing
Note: Sinovation Ventures’ statement on the launch of 01.AI was translated to English using ChatGPT.
Editing by Thu Huong Le and Dhania Putri Sarahtika
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