More than 20 former executives of major Internet companies are vying for the "first brother of the big model"|Titanium Media AGI

The AI (artificial intelligence) entrepreneurial outlet is crowding the former executives of major domestic Internet companies.

In the past few years, AI has been in a booming stage and has become the most promising hot industry at the moment. It is also in the past few years that many executives who have held important positions in Internet giants such as Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu and Meituan have also left one after another, choosing to devote themselves to the AI industry to pan for gold.

For example, Wang Huiwen, the former co-founder and senior vice president of Meituan, once paid out of his own pocket and spent $50 million to found Light-Year away, with the goal of building China's OpenAI; Jia Yangqing, the former chief AI scientist and vice president of technology of Alibaba, founded Lepton AI, an AI machine learning infrastructure company; and Wang Changhu, the former head of vision technology at ByteDance, founded Aishi Technology and entered the AI video generation track......

There are far more such people than the above three.

According to the statistics of Titanium Media AGI, more than 20 former executives of four Internet companies, Meituan, Byte Toutiao, Baidu and Alibaba, have now embarked on the road of AI entrepreneurship.

Meituan

Wang Huiwen is the former co-founder and senior vice president of Meituan

Wang Huiwen is Meituan CEO Wang Xing's Tsinghua University roommate and entrepreneurial partner, and was once Meituan's co-founder and senior vice president. In 2010, the second year after Meituan was founded, Wang Huiwen was invited by Wang Xingzhi to join Meituan, and then led Meituan to break through from the "Thousand Group War", create Meituan Takeaway, conquer local life, seize the beach, etc., and gradually grow into Meituan's No. 2 person after CEO Wang Xing. In December 2020, Meituan officially announced Wang Huiwen's official retirement.

On February 13, 2023, Wang Huiwen announced that she would personally invest $50 million to establish Beijing Lightyear Beyond Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Lightyear Away"), with the goal of building China's OpenAI.

In May 2023, Wang Huiwen was revealed to have physical health problems and could not continue to start a business. In June of the same year, Meituan announced the acquisition of all interests outside Lightyear for 2.065 billion yuan, including 234 million US dollars in cash, 367 million yuan in debt and 1.00 yuan in cash. "The acquisition of leading AGI technology and talent through the acquisition has the opportunity to strengthen Meituan's competitiveness in the fast-growing AI industry," the announcement said. ”

In April 2024, Meituan CEO Wang Xing released an internal email saying that Wang Huiwen is gradually recovering and will serve as a Meituan consultant for part of the time.

Ma Zhankai is a former product consultant for Meituan

Ma Zhankai used to be the product manager of Sogou, promoted the establishment of the Sogou input method and served as the product manager, from 0 to 100 million users, known as the "father of Sogou input method", and then served as a product manager and design director in 360 company, and joined Meituan as a consultant in 2021, planning the zero-yuan lottery model of the group buying website.

On March 28, 2023, Ma Zhankai announced on Weibo that he would join Lightyear, and said: "Large-scale model-based AGI has opened the fourth scientific and technological revolution, which will be a multi-level and multi-wave big wave, which will eventually change everything, and I must participate in it." ”

Liu Jiang is the former president of Meituan Institute of Technology

Liu Jiang used to be the dean of Meituan Institute of Technology, served as the editor-in-chief of CSDN, a well-known Chinese IT technology exchange platform, and has long been engaged in technical team building and talent training.

On February 15, 2023, Liu Jiang announced that he would join Lightyear Beyond and become the company's No. 2 employee. Liu Jiang said that he joined Lightyear mainly to help Wang Huiwen recruit people. "(I) will help Lao Wang (Wang Huiwen) build a dream team of China's AI large model, benchmark OpenAl, and build China's own ChatGPT and basic large model. ”

Jun Yang is the former co-founder and vice president of Meituan

Yang Jun is also an alumnus of Wang Xing's Tsinghua University, and the two worked together for 15 years to co-found China's first social networking sites for college students, inside and outside the university (later renamed Renren), Fanfu, and Meituan. In the Internet "Thousand Regiments War", Yang Jun and Meituan COO Gan Jiawei teamed up to build the Meituan Network Push Iron Army, which helped Meituan achieve victory.

After Yang Jun left Meituan in 2014, he established Beijing Harbour City Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Harbour City Technology") in November 2017. According to the official website, the company has developed a sperm whale app that allows users to chat and interact with characters created by AI technology in real time.

On April 3, 2024, the industrial and commercial changes of Harbour City Technology were made, and the shareholders were added Wang Huiwen, Chen Liang, and Ningbo Meishan Bonded Port Area Weijia Investment Management Partnership (Limited Partnership), and the registered capital of the company increased from about 1.1596 million yuan to about 1.2152 million yuan.

Chen Liang is the former senior vice president of Meituan

Chen Liang and Wang Xing are middle and high school classmates, and in 2005, they co-founded the school intranet with Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen and others. After joining Meituan in 2011, Chen Liang has been responsible for Meituan's mobile, wine and tourism, fresh food and community group buying businesses.

Chen Liang has made two major achievements in Meituan: first, in the early days when he was in charge of Meituan's hospitality business, he broke through the blockade of the high market share of leading OTA platforms such as Ctrip, and led Meituan's hospitality business to achieve the second level in the industry after Ctrip in 2015;

At the time of his resignation from Meituan in February 2023, Chen Liang was already a senior vice president of Meituan and a member of the S-team, the top management decision-making body, managing three major projects: Meituan Preferred, Meituan Grocery Shopping, and Kuaidun.

In April 2023, it was reported that Chen Liang had left Meituan to devote himself to AI model-related entrepreneurship and had contacted a small number of investment institutions.

Guo Qing is the former senior vice president of Meituan

Guo Qing joined Meituan in 2014 and was a member of Meituan's senior team, executive chairman of the sales committee, senior vice president of Meituan, and head of Meituan's hospitality and tourism department. He led the team to build Meituan's hospitality business from 0 to 1, and also helped Meituan surpass Booking to become the world's largest hotel booking platform in 2020. In May 2021, Guo Qing was transferred to the Cycling Division as the general manager. In October of the same year, Guo Qing announced his resignation from Meituan, where he had worked for 7 years.

In July 2021, Guo Qing joined Beijing Oak Heron Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Oak Heron Technology") as co-founder and CEO. According to public information, Oak Heron Technology is a robot R&D and application company for life service scenarios, with products covering hotel self-service terminals, delivery service robots and other categories, and has a number of patents and innovative applications in technologies such as robot autonomous movement algorithms, multi-task concurrent scheduling, and cloud "intelligent" management.

On December 14, 2023, Oak Heron Technology received tens of millions of yuan in financing from JD.com. According to insiders, the main purpose of JD.com's investment is to poach Guo Qing.

In January 2024, it was reported that Guo Qing had joined JD.com as a JD.com consultant, focusing on instant retail and robotics businesses.

Liu Bocong is the former head of the algorithm of Meituan's automatic vehicle delivery department

In 2010, he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). After graduation, he joined Qualcomm, and in 2014, Liu Bocong joined the autonomous driving department of Baidu American Research Institute. In December 2016, he joined Pony.ai as a founding member, responsible for perception technology, and participated in the design and development of multiple unmanned vehicle modules.

At the end of 2020, Liu Bocong left Pony.ai and joined Meituan as the head of the algorithm in the autonomous vehicle delivery department. Under the leadership of Liu Bocong, Meituan's self-developed unmanned delivery vehicle was officially put into operation in Shunyi, Beijing in 2021.

According to reports, in April 2024, Liu Bocong has resigned from Meituan and entered the smart hardware business, which may be in the direction of XR smart hardware, and has completed the first round of financing.

Alibaba

Yangqing Jia is the former chief AI scientist and vice president of technology at Alibaba

Yang graduated from Tsinghua University with a bachelor's degree and received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. During his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, he founded and open-sourced Caffe, a deep learning framework that has been adopted by Microsoft, Yahoo, NVIDIA, Adobe, and others. Prior to joining Alibaba, Mr. Jia worked at Google Brain and Facebook.

In March 2019, Jia Yangqing joined Alibaba as Vice President of Technology, mainly leading the research and development of big data computing platforms, and on September 27, Jia Yangqing, Vice President of Alibaba Group, President and Senior Researcher of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Computing Platform Business Unit, became the head of Alibaba's Open Source Technology Committee.

During his four years at Alibaba, Jia Yangqing has connected the two major platforms of big data and AI, established a real-time and offline integrated big data platform ODPS, and applied Alibaba's large-scale distributed machine learning platform PAI 3.0 and the Damo Academy M6 large modelIn addition, Jia Yangqing led the Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Computing Platform Business Unit to promote the establishment of the ModelScope open source model community, thereby driving Alibaba Cloud's business growth. At present, the Alibaba Cloud Magic Community has attracted more than 2 million AI developers and more than 1,000 high-quality AI models contributed by more than 20 top AI institutions.

At the end of March 2023, Jia Yangqing posted on Moments, saying that he would officially resign from a series of positions such as vice president of technology at Alibaba, and planned to move towards the next challenge in his career.

In the same year, Jia Yangqing teamed up with Xie Yadong, a former senior front-end technology expert at Alibaba, to found Lepton AI, an AI start-up company, aiming to build an efficient AI application platform. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA.

In May 2023, Lepton AI completed its first angel round of financing, which was invested by Fusion Fund and CRV Ventures.

Wu Hanqing is the former chief security scientist of Alibaba Cloud and a P10 researcher

Wu Hanqing joined Alibaba in 2005, responsible for network security, led the construction of Alibaba's B2B, Taobao, Alipay early application security system, in 2007, only 23-year-old Wu Hanqing became the youngest technical expert of Alibaba Group, is Ali security from scratch, from there to strong.

Since 2009, Wu Hanqing has joined Alibaba Cloud and is responsible for cloud computing security and anti-cyber fraud. In 2017, Wu Hanqing was selected by MIT Technology Review as one of the world's 35 under the age of 35 young science and technology innovation talents.

In May 2023, Wu Hanqing resigned from Alibaba Cloud. Together with two other founders and a team of 13 startups, he founded an AI company, KMind (later renamed Hangzhou Half Universe Technology Co., Ltd., hereinafter referred to as "Half Universe").

According to the official website, the mission of Half Universe is to invent a new type of AI PC (artificial intelligence personal computer), break the data monopoly of contemporary Internet companies, let data create value for individuals, small and micro enterprises, and finally realize a free, open, shared and equal AI Internet.

Wu Hanqing once told Titanium Media App that personal AI PCs mainly achieve two types of tasks, one is to automate the processing of data, and the other is to learn to use tools. There is only one essential job to be accomplished by a personal AI PC: manipulating data. This also determines that half of the universe is different from OpenAI, half of the universe pursues personal AI computers, and OpenAI may eventually form an AI agent ecosystem.

Qi Yuan is the former vice president of Ant Group and chief data scientist of Ant Financial

Qi Yuan graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology with a bachelor's degree in automatic control, and after obtaining a master's degree in pattern recognition from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he worked in the MIT Media Lab for machine learning.

In 2014, Qi Yuan joined Alibaba as vice president of Alibaba Group, and co-founded iDST, the predecessor of Damo Academy, with Tu Zipei, Jin Rong and others. In July 2015, Qi Yuan was appointed Vice President and Chief Data Scientist of Ant Group, where he founded and led Ant Financial's AI team. In 2021, Qi Yuan resigned from Ant Group.

In May 2022, Qi Yuan founded the AI pharmaceutical company Infinite Lightyear, with a registered capital of 13 million US dollars, with Qi Yuan as the legal person, and its business scope includes medical research and experimental development (except for the development and application of human stem cells, genetic diagnosis and treatment technology), and won the first round of capital injection of 10 million yuan from Qiming Venture Capital.

After a year of development, Lightyear's entrepreneurial track shifted from AI pharma to generative AI and AGI R&D. According to Qubit reports, Infinite Lightyear is planning to build a base for its self-developed 10 billion large model, and eventually build industry applications for medical, gaming and education scenarios.

Li Guo is the former Tmall hand-to-hand product expert and the person in charge of the Tmall Luxury Pavilion virtual app

After Li Guo left Tmall, he founded a company specializing in AIGC commercial video advertising in 2020 - FancyTech, whose main business is to help brands re-mine the value of data and traffic through self-developed AIGC technology, and solve various pain points arising from their cross-platform operation.

At present, the number of employees in the company is about 80-100 people, and the technical team accounts for 50%, and it is basically concentrated in the West Lake District of Hangzhou.

According to public information, FancyTech has completed 4 rounds of financing, and the most recent Series B financing will occur in September 2023, with a financing amount of nearly 100 million yuan, led by DCM, followed by GSR Venture Capital and Huashan Capital.

Zhu Xiaohu, managing partner of GSR Venture Capital Fund, said that FancyTech's products have a particularly strong ability to liquidate, "In 2022, when we invested, we only had more than 10 million income, and in 2023, it will be more than 50 million, an increase of five or six times, and they are all profitable." ”

According to the official website, Fancytech has directly cooperated with more than 600 brands, including clothing, FMCG, wine, digital, mother and child and other industries, with a monthly revenue of nearly 10 million yuan, and some of the income has come from overseas.

Wu Chunsong is a senior product expert at Ali and the head of Ali Intelligent Design Laboratory

Wu Chunsong used to be a senior product expert of Alibaba and the head of Ali's intelligent design laboratory. He built the AI design platform "Luban", and then took charge of the Taobao content tool business and incubated the Taobao merchant short video tool pro-shot App.

In June 2022, Wu Chunsong and Chen Binghui, the former senior technical expert of Alibaba and the head of video production and playback technology of Taobao content middle platform, co-founded Tekan Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Tekan Technology"), the core team of Tekan has many years of experience in technology and product implementation in the field of generative AI and B-end video live broadcast tools, and is committed to creating a content tool SaaS that serves global e-commerce merchants. Tabcut.com video intelligent generation tool, and "anchor treasure" of digital human live broadcast tool.

In December 2022, Tekan Technology completed an angel round of financing of tens of millions of yuan, which was led by Frees Capital and followed by Jiacheng Capital. This round of financing is mainly used to build a product technology platform and accelerate the global layout.

Baidu

Lv Ping, former general manager of Baidu smart furniture hardware

Cheng graduated from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom with degrees in Financial Mathematics and Marketing. In 2014, he founded Raven Technology, launched the Leliu App and mobile phone interaction system Flow, and in 2017, Raven Technology was wholly acquired by Baidu, and Lv Cheng served as the general manager of Baidu Smart Home Hardware.

At the end of 2017At the Baidu World Conference, Raven Technology led by Lv Cheng launched Baidu smart speaker Raven H, which was positioned as the entrance to Baidu's competition for smart home scenes, priced at 1699 yuan. But due to overpricing, Raven H sales were dismal.

In June 2018, Lu Cheng left Baidu to found AI startup Cyber Manufacture Co. (now renamed Rabbit). At the end of 2023, Rabbit received three financings totaling $30 million in two months, including Vinod Khosla, the global king of technology investment, and Kakao, a South Korean internet giant.

In January 2024, Rabbit launched a consumer-grade AI device, the Rabbit R1. According to the official website, Rabbit R1 can use its own operating system, Rabbit OS, to connect to mobile phone applications, so that users can call all apps on their mobile phones only by voice. Lv Cheng positions it as an "intermediary between users and smartphones", using AI to change the way users interact with apps in the future.

Less than a week after its launch, pre-orders for the Rabbit R1 exceeded 40,000 units. However, as of now, the Rabbit R1 has not been shipped as scheduled.

Li Shuo is the former vice president of Baidu and the general manager of the intelligent cloud strategy industry

Li Shuo graduated from the School of Software of Shandong University in 2006 and joined Baidu in the same year, starting from a trainee engineer to a management position, and has served as the head of many important business teams such as Baidu search, basic technology, IDC strategic cooperation, AI platform, intelligent cloud business group, industrial intelligence department, financial business department and customer achievement center. In June 2023, Li Shuo resigned from Baidu.

In November 2023, Li Shuo was revealed to have founded Liyang Shenzhou Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Liyang Shenzhou") and served as the company's chairman and senior engineer.

On November 24, 2023, Rayon China released the first large-scale model of the home service industry in China, which has initially possessed the potential of human-machine collaboration, which can disassemble and distribute task instructions to smart devices.

With the advancement of related technologies such as the Internet of Things and service robots, especially the emergence of large models, practitioners can see the possibility of home service scenarios being changed by deep digitalization.

Jing Kun is the former vice president of Baidu Group and CEO of Xiaodu Technology

Jing Kun received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Wuhan University and Zhejiang University. In June 2006, after graduating with a master's degree, Jing Kun joined Microsoft (China) and served as the chief R&D director, responsible for the R&D of Microsoft Bing search in the Asian market, and is also the creator of the conversational AI robot Microsoft "Xiaoice", known as the "father of Xiaoice".

In 2014, Jing Kun joined Baidu as the chief product architect of Big Search, responsible for the overall product planning, innovation and implementation of Baidu Big Search, and pioneered the introduction of innovative search interaction methods such as voice search, image search, and conversational search. After that, he was promoted to General Manager of the Smart Life Business Group (SLG) and Vice President of Baidu Group, reporting directly to Robin Li. Jing Kun is known as "the first person to be the product manager of AGI in China" by the industry.

In September 2020, Xiaodu Technology was officially established, with Jing Kun as CEO. Under the leadership of Jing Kun, it took less than 3 years for Xiaodu Technology to achieve a revenue of 5 billion a year and a gross profit of 500 million, close to breakeven.

In October 2023, Jing Kun left Baidu. It is reported that he will join hands with Zhu Kaihua, the former CTO of Xiaodu, to devote himself to entrepreneurship in the direction of large models.

Ma Jie is the former vice president of Baidu and general manager of Baidu Security

In 2011, Ma Jie founded the first SaaS-based cloud security service brand "Security Treasure" in China, which changed the contradiction of high performance and low price of traditional security products, and professionally solved various attacks such as hacker intrusion and DDoS for websites.

In 2015, Baidu acquired Anbao, and Ma Ming served as Baidu's vice president and general manager of cloud security, fully responsible for Baidu's security department, intelligent cloud Internet of Things department, and ARM cloud service business.

In May 2023, Ma Jie joined Kai-Fu Lee's Innovation Works as vice president and established the AIGC enterprise "Beijing Zero One Everything Technology Co., Ltd."

Cao Xiaodong is the former vice president of Baidu, the head of the mobile ecosystem user growth and interactive entertainment platform

Cao Xiaodong joined Baidu in 2009 and was promoted to vice president in 2020, where he single-handedly created Haokan Video, which led to a breakthrough in the number of app users from 0 to 100 million, and in February 2021, after Baidu completed the acquisition of Huanju Group's domestic live streaming business (i.e., "YY Live"), Cao Xiaodong was appointed head of YY Live.

In December 2021, Cao Xiaodong resigned from Baidu, and then founded Beijing Lingxi Shenzhi Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Lingxi Shenzhi"), an AIGC live broadcast large model company, with the goal of becoming the world's leading AIGC e-commerce live broadcast application and e-commerce large model company.

In October 2023, Lingxi Shenzhi launched its first AIGC live broadcast product, Miaobo App, and launched it on six mainstream platforms such as Meituan, Douyin, and Kuaishou. According to Cao Xiaodong, Miaobo App can help customers achieve - "generate a TOP live broadcast room in 60 seconds to help merchants easily acquire customers" by virtue of Lingxi Shenzhi's six AIGC core technologies.

In December 2023, Lingxi Shenzhi completed an angel round of financing, of which the investors are Qumaru Technology, Cheetah Mobile, and Lingyi Venture Capital, with a total of 50 million yuan in this round of financing. It is understood that the new financing will be used for technology research and development, business development and team building.

ByteDance

Wang Changhu is the former head of vision technology at ByteDance and the director of AI Lab

Wang Changhu joined ByteDance in 2017 and has fully participated in the construction and development of products such as Douyin and TikTok from 0 to 1, built ByteDance's visual algorithm platform and business middle platform, provided AI technical support and business solutions for the group's products, and covered the whole process of content production and consumption of vision-related products. At the end of 2021, Wang Changhu left ByteDance and joined Longfor Group as the general manager of AIOT AI Engine.

Only one year and four months later, Wang Changhu said goodbye to Longhu and started his first business. In April 2023, Wang Changhu founded Aishi Technology and entered the AI video generation track.

In January 2024, Aishi Technology officially released the web version of Wensheng's video product, PixVerse. The PixVerse product page has more than one million monthly visits, ranking first in the global AI product list (aicpb.com) in February, and the cumulative number of videos generated has exceeded 10 million, which is widely used by creators in the production of content such as film and television, advertising, and animation.

In April 2024, Aishi Technology completed the A2 round of financing of over 100 million yuan, led by Ant Group. This round of financing will be used to further iterate the self-developed video generation model, upgrade the team, and accelerate the industrial application of AI video generation technology.

郭传雄 原字节跳动AI Lab总监

Guo Chuanxiong works for ByteDance, engaged in machine learning systems, data center networks, and hardware research and development. Prior to joining ByteDance, he was a researcher at Microsoft Research. He also worked in R&D at Azure Networking, Microsoft's cloud computing division. His research interests are in understanding, designing, and operating large-scale, high-availability computer systems.

In June 2023, Guo Chuanxiong founded Beijing BitSmart Road Information Technology Co., Ltd., which is committed to solving the network scalability and communication efficiency problems faced by AI infrastructure in an end-to-end way, and expanding AI infrastructure to the scale of one million GPUs.

Zhang Qianchuan is the former head of user product of Toutiao

At the beginning of 2023, Zhang Qianchuan announced that he would establish an AI application company after resigning from Toutiao. However, after that, he quickly joined MiniMax, a large-scale model startup, and was in charge of its AI application product, Hoshino.

(This article was first published on the Titanium Media App, author|Ren Yingwen, editor|Lin Zhijia)