Kai Fu Lee's New AI Company: Yi-Open Source

https://www.01.ai/en

by mark_l_watson • 3 years ago

144 72 3 years ago

I read the first paragraph of a paywalled article that said that the company has a $1B evaluation in less than a year.

I have always been a fan - I bought his PhD Thesis to read about 40 years ago. Kai Fu Lee has had an interesting career!

throwaway4good3• 3 years ago

The valuation is mentioned this TechCrunch article as well:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/05/valued-at-1b-kai-fu-lees-l...

Valued at $1B, Kai-Fu Lee’s LLM startup unveils open source model

…

The startup’s ability to commence model training quickly is no doubt an outcome of its smooth fundraising, which is critical to securing top-tier talent and AI processors. While declining to disclose how much 01.AI has raised, Lee said it’s valued at $1 billion after receiving financing from Sinovation Ventures, Alibaba Cloud and other undisclosed investors.

whitten• 3 years ago

What was his thesis about ?

mark_l_watson3• 3 years ago

The thesis described the Sphinx speech to text system. It ran, if I remember correctly, on a few VAX minicomputers.

In the early part of my career (first 20 years) I concentrated on tackling very difficult problems wherever I worked, accepting some failures and some successes. Reading his thesis was important to me because it gave me a feeling for trying to solve hard problems in a low resource environment (although I did have a Lisp Machine, access to a Connection Machine and a Butterfly Machine - so not terribly resource poor!)

For what it’s worth: I am in my 70s, still waste deep in AI tech, and I still look for a few people to follow to get inspired.

echelon2• 3 years ago

What is up with all of these {number}.ai companies?

01.ai

11.ai

https://twelvelabs.io (couldn't get 12.ai, huh?)

There are about a half dozen more.

I'm laughing at the domain squatter that bought 900.ai, 99999.ai, and 1234567.ai

This has to be the worst possible thing to name your company.

growt• 3 years ago

Before the Internet companies would name themselves „1a-locksmith“ to appear first in the yellow pages in book form. Maybe we have gone full cycle?

antupis• 3 years ago

420.ai, 69.ai or 666.ai are much worse.

staunton• 3 years ago

Shh, Elon might get some ideas...

dheera• 3 years ago

In Chinese, 666 is a very good number.

6 sounds like the character 溜 which technically means something like smooth flowing but is used to compliment someone's well-practiced skills.

"666" is often said when someone does something impressive and smoothly. Like if someone double-flips a pancake and it lands perfectly, that's the kind of situation you'd say "666" to compliment them.

Yoric• 3 years ago

Are you telling me that there isn't already a 69.ai working on deepfake porns? I'd be surprised.

throwaway4good3• 3 years ago

Number domain names seem to be popular in countries that don’t use the latin alphabet - ie China or Japan.

01.ai is pretty cool name and domain … for sure beats grok or calling something open when it is actually closed.

mmahemoff• 3 years ago

China and Japan also have numerical stock tickers, e.g. Sony's ticker 6758 instead of e.g. SONY.

I guess numeric IDs like that were a consequence of early tech making it hard to deal with more complex character sets ... maybe the association lives on in those cultures?

There's also deeper associations with numbers like 8 representing luck, 4 meaning death etc.

timfsu• 3 years ago

Another reason number domains are popular in Asia is that they are much easier to type, especially historically on mobile

astrange2• 3 years ago

Number domains are relatively common in China because you can easily make Chinese language puns with them.

(I don't know what this one means, but it probably is one.)

alisonatwork• 3 years ago

I suppose you can pronounce 01 as 零一 (zero one), but also 另一 (another), so 01.ai could be read as "another AI".

Seem like the Chinese name of the company is 零一万物 which could translate as "Zero One All Things" - not a bad name for a tech company.

gwervc• 3 years ago

Look at the name of the company: Yi. Seems congruent then to use 1, pronunced yi in Chinese, as a domain name.

TekMol• 3 years ago

How can an open source company have a valuation of $1B?

How do open source businesses work at all? I sometimes read about companies like these, with huge valuations and then the next day I read about some open source developer asking for donations because their project, which powers half of the internet [1], is not making him enough to pay for food. What makes the difference?

Over the years, I wrote some tools for my own use, which are way better than their commercial counterparts. If I would spend a few weeks to polish one of them and open source it, it would probably gain widespread adoption. But how could I then build that into a business?

[1] Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/

lgeorget• 3 years ago

Not all projects are "business-able" I think. A nice tool with an identifiable user base, a nice UI, etc. is easier to market than a NTP library even if the latter has more probability to be critical and to get installed in billions of devices.

blackoil• 3 years ago

Very common way: Go Open Core, sell hosting and plugins and proprietary engines etc and if that's not enough do a coup and change license to prevent competition from providing same services.

flarion2• 3 years ago

like any other startup. time, energy and passion. define problem/pain. talk loads w potential customers. ask them if they would pay for it. excel in customer success. find ways to scale and be found :)

upupupandaway5• 3 years ago

Or... or... s/he could convince a VC that the startup would multiply the potential opportunity in the space the tools cover by 10x and get a really fat check for generating the right hype with the right crowd.

bman_kg• 3 years ago

the visual you linked makes perfect sense, wonder how many companies are like that...

imjonse• 3 years ago

In this case being open source is a nice feature, but not the main one the business is built around. If you have terabytes of data and thousands of GPUs to train on plus the talent to work on it you have a clear advantage over many other possible competitors, even if you give them the source. This is not nearly comparable to building yet another open source todo app or analytics dashboard in JS.

throwaway4good3• 3 years ago

It is the price equity is being raised at.

OpenAI is at 80B.

pierrefermat1• 3 years ago

You could spend sometime looking into the business models of Elasticsearch/Docker. Albeit not successful in some eyes as they are exactly profit printing, but they have indeed raised enough to be unicorn status.

thibo_skabgia• 3 years ago

Listed OSS business models here if useful: https://github.com/anhtho-lago/awesome-opensource-company#bu...

Also, the comments here were interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37682684

Roark66• 3 years ago

Is it going to be as open as the (not-at-all)OpenAI?

victor9000• 3 years ago

less

Conscat• 3 years ago

We predict that AI 2.0 will create a platform opportunity ten times larger than the mobile internet, rewriting all software and user interfaces.

I was a bit interested until I read this. If this claim is to be believed, then the company appears to be entirely out of touch with reality, and it makes claims like outperforming llama-70b seem even more incredulous.

throwaway4736• 3 years ago

Matt Levine once described this very well, although he did it when referring to Adam Neumann and WeWork. I’m paraphrasing, but there are a subset of people who are able to consistently and accurately to great success exploit a bubble in the VC world, by dint of exactly knowing what to say and of being able to get the meeting in the first place.

Lee being able to credibly sell bullshit like the quoted claim is a feature, not a bug. It’s somewhat irrelevant if he actually believes it.

textcortex• 3 years ago

Yep, agreed. Also somehow this AI 2.0 thing he is mentioning reminds me of web 3.0 bs. Baseless and delusional.

upupupandaway5• 3 years ago

At first I was angry about these grifters because they suck opportunities out of the market, leaving legitimate startups behind. But knowing what I know now, that VCs are also grifters (looking at a16z and its pump and dump crypto win) I have started rooting for the "bad guys". So may Lee attract all VC money in the world to promptly set it on fire like Adam did.

jstummbillig2• 3 years ago

What do you find offence with? Hip speech and yawn-2.0-s aside, I find the claim entirely defendable, given, of course, a certain set of assumptions in this very new and uncertain space.

upupupandaway5• 3 years ago

How is it defendable? How do you defend 10x? What about 11x? Why not 3.5x? This is complete bullshit.

ben_w2• 3 years ago

I'm entirely ready to believe AI will soon write all apps and UI. I don't see such rewrites being a x10 market opportunity, given there's already "an app for that" even when there shouldn't be.

T-A• 3 years ago

Kai-Fu Lee is (among other things) a SciFi author. Check out "AI 2041" to see what he has in mind:

https://www.space.com/artificial-intelligence-anthology-book...

mlazos• 3 years ago

The writing in that book was atrocious, I’d much rather read I, Robot for an all around better and thought provoking experience.

m3kw9• 3 years ago

If they were serious they would have a specific number rather than exactly 10. This is for investment attraction

lhl• 3 years ago

Just an FYI,the Yi license is a custom license an is not what I would describe an "open license": https://huggingface.co/01-ai/Yi-34B/blob/main/LICENSE

It's non-commercial only: "If you plan to use the Yi Series Models and Derivatives for Commercial Purposes, you should contact the Licensor in advance" and "Your use of the Yi Series Models must comply with the Laws and Regulations as well as applicable legal requirements of other countries/regions, and respect social ethics and moral standards," which is all fine and good, but as defined in the terms, “Laws and Regulations” refers to the laws and administrative regulations of the mainland of the People's Republic of China.

I tend to refer to this type of license as NC/China and I don't even bother poking around with those. I'll wait for the next Mistral or other Apache 2.0 model to come out.

Note, for coding, DeepSeek Coder 33B is already stronger and released under a less restrictive license.

ttflee• 3 years ago

The model card for Yi-34B included benchmark scores in several Chinese-oriented evaluation sets, CMMLU, C-eval and GAOKAO.

omneity• 3 years ago

Worth noting they include synthetic data and training other models as derivatives:

“Derivatives” refers to all modifications to Yi Series Models, work based on Yi Series Models, or any other models created or initialized by transferring the weights, parameters, activations, or output patterns of Yi Series Models to other models to achieve similar performance, including but not limited to methods that require using intermediate data representations or generating synthetic data based on Yi Series Models to train other models.

This model does not seem fit at all for public use except maybe for some research. I suspect they have customers lined up or are currently prospecting/in talks, and this release is purely for marketing purposes.

ronsor• 3 years ago

I'm not sure how enforceable that would even be. Since the output of these models can't be copyrighted, you can't apply a license to them either.

The question of whether the weights can be copyrighted is separate, but I also honestly don't think so. I think all these model weight licenses are an emperor's new clothes scenario, where everyone is too afraid to call out the obvious.

RobotToaster2• 3 years ago

Yeah, getting tired of licences like this and stability AI claiming to be open source when they clearly aren't.

menshiki• 3 years ago

Kai Fu Lee has so many terrible takes. Some things he says are borderline delusional.

HlessClaudesman• 3 years ago

His book AI Superpowers is frontloaded with a lot of "Ra Ra mighty China inevitably will win the AI competition" stuff. I just felt sad for him if AI nationalism is his genuine world view, and not just some party line he has to parrot to appease the commissars.

krageon• 3 years ago

Let's not discount folks just because they are patriotic. A lot of people (including ones you probably do respect) fall into that pit - it's like religion, just something people also do. It doesn't change anything else they achieve.

That said, the license on the AI they produce is not open. Calling it open is dumb and for that a certain measure of disrespect is warranted.

Misaka-Chen• 3 years ago

What is ai2.0? I have never heard this notion.

upupupandaway5• 3 years ago

An attempt to coin a sticky term that will be used to group companies in a way that it's easier to sell the "opportunity" to gullible (or greedy) VCs.

visarga• 3 years ago

Maybe it's LLMs as opposed to CNNs, LSTMs and other bespoke models, pre-2020 AI.

re-thc• 3 years ago

3.0 by now.

vincnetas• 3 years ago

What happened to WEB 3.0? Are we there yet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3

mark_l_watson3• 3 years ago

Painfully, years ago I wrote a book with Web 3.0 in the title. For me that meant semantic web and linked data.

I am enjoying reading this entire thread. For AI skeptics: I am not trying to talk you into anything you don’t believe, but just as an experiment, whenever you think about LLMs, appreciate how well they generalize past things they have been trained on. Peter Norvig and a friend of his recently write an article arguing that LLMs probably meet our traditional criteria for AGI.

EDIT: I am aware of the recent paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871 that argues that LLMs have limited generalization capabilities, but I don’t agree.

upupupandaway5• 3 years ago

This sounds more like WeAI.

wodenokoto• 3 years ago

It seems like everyone knows Kai Fu Lee. Is his name something one should recognize if you know Andrew Ng and Yang LeCun?

voz_• 3 years ago

grifter alert, all the alarm bells are going off on this one

wtfpo• 3 years ago

so by downloading some open source data sets, owning a few nvida A100s , -> train, an open source model form scratch using these datasets, get some investors to invest = billion dollar valuation?

hans789• 3 years ago

reaching HuggingFace LLM leaderboard #1 after recent ranking refresh!

Kai Fu Lee's New AI Company: Yi-Open Source

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