In a photo released as a scoop, Wang Huiwen, who has not appeared for a long time, and Dai Yusen, a partner of ZhenFund, are sitting on the same side of a dining table, opposite Liu Yuan, another partner of ZhenFund, and Li Zhifei, the founder of AI company.
This is destined to be a photo that will be talked about in the future. Every new "first year" should have an iconic group photo, such as the "Dongxing Dinner" when the mobile Internet was booming, and Wei Xiaoli, who laughed at the "three hardships". For the suddenly unveiled Chinese ChatGPT business, this is the current one.
Source: Undercurrent Waves
Google's rush into the game has become a dividing line for ChatGPT to really enter the public eye. After that, the Chinese Internet ushered in a high-profile entry spectacle.
Baidu announced on February 7 that it will launch ChatGPT-like conversational AI tool "Wen Xin Yiyan" in March, called ERNIE Bot in English.
A day later, Alibaba revealed that Alibaba's version of the chatbot ChatGPT was under development and was currently chatting with its own employees.
JD.com announced that it will make an industrial version of ChatGPT, named ChatJD.
360, which turned its first loss in 2022, will make a final bet, vowing to take 20 billion All in ChatGPT from the 22 billion on the books. If you don't get in the car, you'd rather die.
All in all, a new "first year moment" that the Chinese Internet circle is waiting for, and the VC circle is looking for.
But when it was about to bite the brightest, it robbed a few moments of all the taste.
ChatGPT these days is in China, the closest to Wang Huiwen.
To be a human being is to be afraid to look ahead. There is no greater heroic beauty in the world than being alone in the crowd and completing a single knife meeting.
At 10 p.m. on February 10, Wang Xing's college roommate, Wang Huiwen, the number two person who "retired" from Meituan, announced in the circle of friends that he had entered ChatGPT - "$50 million, bring capital into the group, don't care about the position, salary and title, and ask for a team." ”
Three days later, the "AI Manifesto" turned into a more concrete statement in its immediate dynamics.
Source: Now
The details behind this hero post have also become precious information, and they have been leaking out one after another.
For example, the group photo mentioned earlier, and the initial capital pattern of the entire project surfaced:
According to media reports such as 36kr, Wang Huiwen contributed 50 million US dollars, and the amount of financing confirmed in the next round of financing is 230 million US dollars. The $230 million of top VC subscriptions are expected to include Zhen Capital and Source Code Capital.
Zhen Capital and Source Code Capital simultaneously delivered their voices to Wang Huiwen.
According to the report, Dai Yusen said that he has been talking to Lao Wang about the future direction in the past few years, and he is deeply moved by Lao Wang's feelings and vision"; Cao Yi, founder of Source Code Capital, said in the circle of friends, "Congratulations to Lao Wang for waiting, and the industry has also waited for Lao Wang to come out." ”
Cheng Lingfeng, who refined the concept of "post-80s", is optimistic about Wang Huiwen, who has the tail of the "post-70s", and believes that the latter is the iterative force of "money, leisure, and ambition" in the pattern that BAT and TMD have become.
There was a lot of applause. It seems that no one has mentioned that in the field of artificial intelligence with extremely high technical thresholds, why wait for this big man with a bright local life resume but "does not understand AI technology at present" to be a game saver.
Looking closely at this "first year moment", it is hasty and even a little lame.
The so-called newly established "Beijing Lightyear Beyond Technology Co., Ltd." is actually an old company established in 2018, so old that the company's legal person Wang Huiwen had not left Meituan at that time, and the registered email address of the new company is still the suffix of Meituan.
The initial $300 million financing, if it falls into ChatGPT, a pre-training black hole composed of 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs 100, is only enough to train 20 times. Zheng Hongda, chief technology officer of Haitong Securities, said on social media that "this is more."
Li Zhifei, who is sitting on the right side of the picture at the dining table, has not yet come out of his predicament. After returning from Google's headquarters in 2012 to start Movi, the company quickly became a unicorn within a few years along an AI investment boom, but quickly cooled down, and there was no public financing news after 2017. The AI company, which has been mired in a mix of store closures and layoffs in recent years, repeatedly mentioned plans to go public look hopeless.
Interestingly, ZhenFund, which participated in Mobvoi's Series C financing, has so far put it on its official website's investment report card, but the two partners are now clearly more concerned about Wang Huiwen. This person who sat at the farthest part of the dining table, "begging to join" under Wang Huiwen's circle of friends, went out and asked the CEO, not knowing what role he wanted to play in this other people's excitement.
People on the forwarding and platform mentioned "Lao Wang's feelings and vision", but some people found that it seemed that it had just ferried to artificial intelligence a few months ago.
In April last year, Wang changed her immediate signature to "Learning Crypto." Crypto was the subject of Wang's research for the next seven months, during which time he initiated frequent discussions about Web 3 and cryptocurrencies. The Web 3 and NFT concepts surrounding cryptocurrencies rose and fell sharply over the past year, until the mid-November news that began with "When the crypto industry returns in the next cycle..."
Source: Now
In the same month, ChatGPT came out, and Wang Huiwen's next immediate dynamic was the "AI hero post" a few days ago. By the way, he replaced the signature "learning Crypto" with "learning artificial intelligence."
In half a year, the figure of "Lao Wang" has changed from a currency circle researcher to an artificial intelligence after entering, which can not be described as unagile. But the intersection of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence in sentiment and vision, except for AI concept tokens such as AGIX, I am afraid that there is nothing.
But this does not prevent more people from continuing to pry into Wang Huiwen's heart: some people praised him for a week of intensive discussion of GPT, some expressed determination and excitement for him, and some people lamented that he answered the phone quickly, indicating that despite being busy, he still has goodwill to the outside world...
Wang Huiwen wanted to get on his ChatGPT ship quickly. At the same time, more people apparently took him as their own ticket.
According to the restoration of the aforementioned report, the excitement reached its peak on the night of February 10. The high-profile entry of the Circle of Friends that night, that is, behind the announcement of the entire project, was the coaxing of some common investment sentences such as "vowing to be China's first All in GPT VC", and the "arrogance" of "To prove that you are serious, you will send a circle of friends to announce".
Then a proud circle of friends is followed by more bold forwards.
But from the release of ChatGPT to its explosion in the domestic technology circle and investment circle, it seems that the determination to enter the game strongly does not come from the release of ChatGPT, and it is obviously not because of the success of GPT-3, but ChatGPT began to enter Bing's search scene, and made Google uneasy for the first time.
This seems to have started a familiar old plot again. The attraction of the scene, the attraction of the model, is greater than everything, the nervousness of entering the game is greater than everything, the slogan of doing China's OpenAI is greater than everything, and the mutual applause of small circles is greater than everything, including the discussion of how OpenAI became what it is today.
Outside of these lively circles of friends, various studies on OpenAI are also placed there:
OpenAI starts with a group of people who still believe it can do it when general AI is in doubt, rather than starting with the rush to "do another DeepMind"; It has designed a highly targeted new investment return on investment agreement after repeatedly hitting nails, rather than simply having money; It has the support of an Internet giant that provides a steady stream of computing power and can profit from it, and even proves that without this support, it is impossible to do this by relying only on the rich and idle bigwigs; It is even exposing the problem of being controlled by only a small group of people to control a universal model, the foundation of the so-called future Internet.
And these may be the problems that latecomers should consider in advance.
Some fruits are tall, others have fallen low. If Wang Huiwen wants to get on the boat, he may need to come out of the circle of friends first.