Author | Yu Huiru Edit | Luo Lijuan
After some foreshadowing, Lee Kai-fu finally made an official announcement.
On March 19, Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and CEO of Innovation Factory, announced through Moments the establishment of Project AI 2.0 Company, positioning itself as a world-class company with a new AI 2.0 platform and AI-first productivity applications.
On the same day, the new company was officially launched on the official website of Innovation Factory.
Unlike the previous official announcement of Wang Huiwen, the former co-founder of Meituan, Lee Kai-fu's new company has made a lot of progress internally.
According to Innovation Factory, so far, a number of senior technical management talents with global manufacturers who can lead large teams have confirmed their intention to join Project AI 2.0. At the same time, Innovation Factory is closely discussing the first round of fundraising with a number of top investors, and will announce it to the outside world in due course.
It is worth mentioning that 5 days before the official announcement of the new project, Innovation Factory organized a media sharing session on AI trends. At the meeting, Kai-Fu Lee shared his views on the many issues of artificial intelligence and the technology investment trend of AI 2.0.
From the media sharing meeting, to the launch of the project's official website, to the announcement of the circle of friends. All indications are that Lee Kai-fu is fighting a prepared battle.
"Project AI 2.0 isn't just about Chinese version of ChatGPT." Kai-Fu Lee said in the circle of friends that he has more and greater imagination for the future of AI 2.0.
1. It is intended to build an AI 2.0 platform
At an AI trend media sharing conference a few days ago, Kai-Fu Lee announced that AI 2.0 has arrived, which is a revolution that must not be missed, and this era will give birth to new platforms and rewrite all applications.
In Kai-Fu Lee's view, "If AI 1.0 is the invention of electricity, AI 2.0 is the power grid." "The former is an explosion of artificial intelligence based on deep learning, and the latter is a breakthrough based on basic large models.
Innovation Factory decided to join this unmissable revolution and create Project AI 2.0.
The new company is in the stage of both capital and technology: on the one hand, Innovation Factory is discussing the first round of fundraising with a number of top investors; On the other hand, Project AI 2.0 is recruiting world-class talents around the world to form a core team, and the recruitment of the first batch of top talents focuses on large models, NLP, multimodal, algorithms, distributed architecture/Infrastucture and other directions.
"More than just Chinese version of ChatGPT," what is Project AI 2.0 going to do beyond that?
Kai-Fu Lee positioned the new company in his circle of friends: "A global company committed to building a new platform for AI 2.0 and AI-first productivity applications." ”
Simply put, we hope to create a platform, a productivity application ecology.
Source: Innovation Factory official website
This is different from the idea of the big guys who have previously announced their entry into the field. Previously, whether it was Wang Huiwen, who had no experience in the field of AI, Li Zhifei, the founder of Mobvoi, who majored in machine translation and natural language processing and worked on Google's AI team for many years, or Wang Xiaochuan, who once held the CEO position of Sogou, they all aimed to "build a Chinese version of OpenAI".
In contrast, Lee Kai-fu has greater "ambitions".
"In the new AI 2.0 era, platform opportunities ten times larger than the mobile Internet will be born." Lee said that high-energy chat tools, AIGC generation for graphic creation, Copilot, and the applications seen today are just the beginning of AI 2.0 capabilities.
2, AI veteran Kai-Fu Lee
Kai-Fu Lee, who has passed the age of flower armor, is not the first big man to announce his entry into ChatGPT, but he may be the most anticipated one from the outside world.
This is related to their past experience.
Kai-Fu Lee officially entered the field of AI 40 years ago. At the time, 22-year-old Kai-Fu Lee was applying for a PhD at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University). In his application, he wrote: AI is the interpretation of human learning process, the quantification of human thought processes, the clarification of human behavior, and the understanding of human intelligence.
Compared with the high-profile official announcement of Wang Huiwen, Lee Kaifu belongs to the academic school of Zhengzhengmiao Hong. The Innovation Factory he founded is positioned as a technology VC, and AI has always been a banner of the Innovation Factory.
In addition to fund investment, Innovation Factory has also been incubating companies through spire incubation.
The so-called spire incubation means that the innovation factory needs to be identified by technological trends at a very early stage. After setting specific technical topics at the strategic level, dig deep into the professionals in the field, research papers, and track the latest developments in the industry. Then, help entrepreneurs recruit teams, polish products, find business opportunities, do marketization, and assist in fundraising.
Project AI 2.0 is not the first company incubated at the top of the Innovation Factory. All-weather Technology learned from the official website of Innovation Factory that before Project AI 2.0, the other 6 companies were Lanzhou Technology, Innovation Qizhi, Chengyuan Technology, Doubley Technology, Jiexiang Lingyue and MOOTION.
Among them, Chuangxinqizhi, founded in February 2018, has landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and was named "the first stock of AI+ manufacturing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange"; Lanzhou Technology made the Mencius model.
According to Innovation Factory, in the early stage of Project AI 2.0 preparation, Lee Kai-fu will spend considerable time personally leading the formation of the new company, focusing on recruiting a new world-class management team. When the CEO of Project AI 2.0 arrives, he will balance Project AI 2.0 with fund management.
3. Hot big model entrepreneurship
In the first quarter of 2023, the hot topics in the tech world are almost all related to ChatGPT.
On the other side of the ocean, from investing in large-model companies to releasing generative dialogue products, Microsoft and Google are secretly competing and taking turns.
Among the domestic manufacturers, Ali, Tencent, JD.com, Byte, etc. have announced their entry into the game, and the "AI pioneer" Baidu has released the generative dialogue product Wen Xin on March 16. Before Baidu, the team of Professor Qiu Xipeng of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory of Fudan University released the first conversational AI model "MOSS" in China in February, inviting the public to participate in the internal test.
According to the latest news disclosed by Baidu, since Baidu's official announcement of "Wenxin Yiyan" in February, more than 650 companies have announced their access to the Wenxin Yiyan ecosystem. Wen Xin's first day invited more than 600,000 people to apply.
As of 13 pm on March 20, 4 days after the release of Wenxin Yiyan, 21 enterprises have completed the first batch of signed cooperation, and more than 100,000 enterprises have applied for Wen Xin Yiyan API call service test.
At the same time, Baidu said that Baidu Intelligent Cloud will hold a new product launch conference on March 27 to release a series of cloud services and application products.
When ChatGPT stands on the wind, the big guys who have already achieved fame also want to be "pigs on the vent" again.
Last month, Wang Huiwen, the former "number two person in Meituan", Li Zhifei, the founder of Qianwei, and Dai Yusen and Liu Yuan, two partners of ZhenFund, had a meal together. At the dinner table, talking about this wave of AI, Wang Huiwen invited Li Zhifei to join forces with all in the big model.
Subsequently, Wang Huiwen issued a talent seeking order on social platforms, saying that he would team up to embrace the new era and create China's Open AI. He set up Lightyear Beyond Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: Lightyear Beyond) in Beijing, with his own investment of 50 million US dollars.
Not long after, his old partner Wang Xing announced in the circle of friends that he would personally participate in the Series A investment of Wang Huiwen's startup "light years away" and serve as a director.
However, when Wang Huiwen issued a petition for merit, Li Zhifei, who was eating with him, became an opponent. In a media interview at the end of February, Li Zhifei said that the short-term goal is to make a 60-point general model by June next year.
Wang Xiaochuan, the former CEO of Sogou, who has been low-key for a long time, also appeared. He announced through his circle of friends that he would enter the battlefield of the Chinese version of OpenAI and admitted to the media that the project was "in preparation."
Following Wang Huiwen, Li Zhifei, and Wang Xiaochuan, former JD AI head Zhou Bowen also posted hero posts in the circle of friends, saying that there is no upper limit to recruit partners to create a Chinese version of ChatGPT.
However, he is taking a differentiated path - vertical integration from his own basic big model to the closed-loop of applications and users in all scenarios, realizing the "double landing" of generative artificial intelligence technology and business value.
From Wang Huiwen, Li Zhifei, Wang Xiaochuan, Zhou Bowen, and then to Li Kaifu, these bigwigs have bright backgrounds and a lot of money, all of whom have the blessing of past achievements.
In addition to Wang Huiwen, the past experiences of Li Zhifei, Wang Xiaochuan, Zhou Bowen, Li Kaifu and others can be more or less linked to technical fields such as AI and search. Although the technical strength is the weakest, Wang Huiwen's financial resources can also support his ambitions.
Who can build the Chinese version of OpenAI, time will tell.