01.AI plans to monetize its operations by building a proprietary model that will serve as a foundation for a range of commercial products. The company has also stockpiled GPUs in anticipation of U.S. sanctions and has a supply that will suffice for at least the next 12-18 months. The company's ultimate goal is to become an ecosystem where outside developers can build applications easily. Lee believes that China can build better applications than American developers due to its robust mobile internet ecosystem.
Key takeaways:
- Kai-Fu Lee, a renowned computer scientist, has launched a company called 01.AI with the aim of developing a large language model for the Chinese market, putting him in competition with other Chinese tech leaders.
- Seven months after its founding, 01.AI has released its first model, the open-source Yi-34B, which is a bilingual (English and Chinese) base model trained with 34 billion parameters.
- The company has secured significant funding, valued at $1 billion, from investors including Sinovation Ventures and Alibaba Cloud, and has grown to over 100 employees, many of whom are LLM experts from major tech firms.
- 01.AI plans to monetize its operations by building a state-of-the-art proprietary model that serves as a foundation for a range of commercial products, while continuing to open source some of its models.